Windows newlines on files

Question

Hi all you there.
my question is this, windows newlines and unix newlines are recognized diferent by the many editors, and platforms, windows notepad does not recognize unix newlines so when you try to open a file a mess is displayed, i've seen that you can change the java encoding so you can save files with the microsoft windows standart characters.
any one can help me ?
thanks in advanced =)
regards.

Answer 1

It has nothing to do with encoding.
There's a System property--line.separator--that determines what to use. It's used when you to println on a PrintWriter, for intsance. If you're running on windows, then when you create a file, it will have a windows line terminator. You might be able to explicitly set line.separator, or to set something in the Writer object, to cause it to use a different line terminator than whatever the default is for the system on which you're running.
Normally one doesn't worry about it. You just write in whatever is appropriate for the platform on which you're running, and then either use something like FTP to make the change on the fly as you transfer it to another system, or use an editor that can interpret the various line terminators.
If you're running on unix or mac and you know you're going to be opening the file with windows, then you might want to look into explicitly setting the line terminator.