[Gretl-devel] Re: line break problems with outfile on Windows

On Sat, 12 Dec 2020, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> > The file got 5 new characters, and closer inspection shows this content: > noCRCRLFsleepCRCRLFtillCRCRLFBrooklynCRLF > > This time there's no email involved, just gretl I think! This whole business is an annoyance and stumbling-block for coders almost as severe as Microsoft's persistence with an unholy mixture of 8-bit "system codepage" and UTF-16. They persist in using two bytes to indicate what everyone else indicates in one byte (start a new line), because in the stone age this required two operations of a teletype machine: crank the paper up a line, and return the print-head to the left. Getting this "right" in a cross-platform program is a horror-show. That said, it might now be better in current git and snapshot. Keyword: "binary mode" or "b" when calling the C library function fopen() for reading or writing. It does nothing except when you're handling text files on Windows. But when should you use it, and when not?