newline

From new +‎ line, Coined by Bell Laboratories during development of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system.

newline (plural newlines)

1. (computing) The character or character sequence that indicates the end of a line of text and transition to the next line; or, a control code or escape sequence used in a programming language to denote this character.

   Synonyms: line break, carriage return, end-of-line, \n

   Hyponyms: hard return, soft return

   Microsoft Windows uses CRLF to represent a newline.

   • 1959, Association for Computing Machinery, Communications of the ACM (ACM Digital Library)‎, page 599:

     The ugly part is the quote marks on two adjacent lines that mean a newline character.

   • 1987, T. D. Brown, C for Basic Programmers‎, page 13:

     The calculator program starts off by printing the string "0\n", that is, it prints a zero and then moves to a newline.

   • 2002, Laura Lemay, Rafe Colburn, Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days‎, page 69:

     Unlike in C, you don't have to loop through the output and watch every character to make sure it's a newline; Perl will keep track of that for you.

   • 2002, Allen B. Downey, Jeffrey Elkner, Chris Meyers, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python:

     It contains only a single statement, which outputs a newline character. (That's what happens when you use a print command without any arguments.)

   • 2006, Jeffrey E.F. Friedl, Mastering Regular Expressions‎, page 111:

     The original Unix regex tools worked on a line-by-line basis, so the thought of matching a newline wasn't an issue until the advent of sed and lex.