On Wed, 23 Apr 2014, Logan Kelly wrote: That's by design. The two sister funtions/commands printf and sprintf support ASCII control characters, simple assignment does not. If you need to embed a newline or a tab into a string, use sprintf. For example: <hansl> sprintf a "%d\t%d", 3, 4 print a </hansl> That said, we are considering the idea to turn the sprintf command into a function (this is already available in CVS and the snapshots), so perhaps you may want to experiment with the new notation, which would be scalar n = sprintf(a, "%d\t%d", 3, 4) where n is the number of characters that "a" contains. ------------------------------------------------------- Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES) Università Politecnica delle Marche (formerly known as Università di Ancona) r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti -------------------------------------------------------