[Python-3000] Lines breaking (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Thu May 31 04:49:39 CEST 2007

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

The Unicode newline recommendation is all about making the use of characters match their physical presentation. If on a printer, you force a new page with FF, you will see a physical line break at the end of the page containing the FF. Similarly with VT.

I'm worried here about loss of information. Currently, a Python-recognised line break character signifies a line break and nothing else. You can read a file as lines, strip off the newlines, do some processing, and add the newlines back in when writing out the results, without losing anything essential.

But an FF or VT is not just a line break, it can have other semantics attatched to it as well. So treating it just the same as a \n by default would be wrong, I think.

-- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | Carpe post meridiem! | Christchurch, New Zealand | (I'm not a morning person.) | greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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