[Python-3000] Lines breaking

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Thu May 31 19:50:28 CEST 2007


Bill Janssen writes:

 > > But an FF or VT is not *just* a line break, it can
 > > have other semantics attatched to it as well. So
 > > treating it just the same as a \n by default would be
 > > wrong, I think.
 > 
 > I agree.  I have text files which contain lines of FF NL, which
 > are supposed to be single lines with a FF as their content (to signify
 > a page break), not two separate lines.

I agree that that looks nice in my editor, but it is not Unicode-
conforming practice, and I suspect that if you experiment with any
printer you'll discover that you get an empty line at the top of the
page.

I also suspect that any program that currently is used to process
those files' content by lines probably simply treats the FF as
whitespace, and throws away empty lines.  If so, it will still work
with FF treated as a hard line break in line-processing mode, since
the trailing NL will now generate a (superfluous) empty line.

Given that, is this going to matter to you?


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