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May we recommend..
Skrommel's One Hour Software
Skrommel's One Hour Software image

It's safe to say that mysterious and reclusive DC member Skrommel single-handedly built the Coding Snacks section of the DonationCoder forum, where people request small custom applications. Coding in the Autohotkey scripting language, Skrommel is also one of the fastest coders we've seen -- when he is on the prowl it's not uncommon for him to finish coding a request before most of us have had time to even read it. He also typically shares his source code along with the compiled utility, which makes it possible for others to extend and customize his tools.

  • Number of programs available: 80+
  • Last updated: 2017
  • Visit skrommel's page to browse his apps and download them here: http://www.dcmembers.com/skrommel.
  • Visit skrommel's section on our forum: here.

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The New line character \n\n

blog clipart
I stumbled on the NewLine article on wikipedia today during some random browsing, and I never expected it to be so fascinating.

It shows some interesting history, and how many different Operating Systems have different control characters to represent a new line, and for different reasons.

There is also some confusion as to whether newlines terminate or separate lines. If a newline is considered a separator, there will be no newline after the last line of a file. The general convention on most systems is to add a newline even after the last line, i.e., to treat newline as a line terminator. Some programs have problems processing the last line of a file if it isn't newline terminated. Conversely, programs that expect newline to be used as a separator will interpret a final newline as starting a new (empty) line. This can result in a different line count being reported for the file, but is otherwise generally harmless.

wow... I never even thought about it that way. I guess it can be interpreted both as a separator and as a terminator. I can see how some interoperability problems could occur. This is one of those things that, when I really think about it, makes me realize that it's a small miracle that software as we have it today works at all! - When programs can't even agree on what a new line is, or even how to treat it.

It doesn't stop there, the problem persists on our internets:

Most textual Internet protocols (including HTTP, SMTP, FTP, IRC and many others) mandate the use of ASCII CR+LF (0x0D 0x0A) on the protocol level, but recommend that tolerant applications recognize lone LF as well. In practice, there are many applications that erroneously use the C newline character '\n' instead (see section Newline in programming languages below). This leads to problems when trying to communicate with systems adhering to a stricter interpretation of the standards; one such system is the qmail MTA that actively refuses to accept messages from systems that send bare LF instead of the required CR+LF.

posted by Gothi[c] donate to Gothi[c]
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