Reputation: 11754

Text Editor which shows \r\n?

I'm looking for a text editor that can show me the actual carriage returns and newlines.

E.g. if I save this string: "This\rIs\r\nA\nString"

Instead of showing

This
Is
A
String

I'm looking for some text editor which will show

This\rIs\r\nA\nString

I believe a problem with my text-file parsing in a certain program is being caused by inconsistent newline/carriage return/both on the ends of lines.

I could just make a program which can read a file and display it with that formatting, but I figured it'd be easier if anyone knew of one that can already do it.

Thanks!

[EDIT]
Forgot to specify I'm on Windows, and installing Cygwin isn't really an option. Otherwise I would use vi or vim.
Also, if there's a way to do this in PSPad, which is already installed, it would be awesome if you knew that too. Thanks!

Upvotes: 143

Answers (17)

Thomas Owens

Reputation: 116187

With Notepad++, you can show end-of-line characters. It shows CR and LF, instead of "\r" and "\n", but it gets the point across. However, it will still insert the line breaks. But you do get to see the line-ending characters.

To use Notepad++ for this, open the View menu, open the Show Symbols slide out, and select either "Show all characters" or "Show end-of-line characters".

enter image description here

Upvotes: 266

T.E.D.

Reputation: 44814

You can get this in Emacs by changing the mode. For example, here is what things look like in Whitespace mode.

Upvotes: 4

Adam Tolley

Reputation: 955

GVIM runs on Windows, and there is VIM for cmd.

Check http://www.vim.org/download.php

Also, a quick look through the docs or google, or some vimmy friends can help you to use VIM's quick search and replace to fix the problem you are having I believe.

Upvotes: 0

wruckie

Reputation: 1803

Sorry to join the bandwagon so late but in Windows 10, Notepad2 will show them. Choose from the menu View\Show Line Endings

Upvotes: 1

Blake

Reputation: 725

Sublime Text 3 has a plugin called RawLineEdit that will display line endings and allow the insertion of arbitrary line-ending type:

https://github.com/facelessuser/RawLineEdit

Upvotes: 10

MBarbosaEng

Reputation: 1

The best for replace \n \t and more: Programmer's File Editor http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/pfefiles.htm

Upvotes: 0

Rook

Reputation: 62568

Slickedit and Notepad2 also show them. In Slickedit you can customize all sorts of invisible characters (whitespace, tabs, CRs, line feeds, ...) and display them with any character you wish.

Upvotes: 0

jussij

Reputation: 10580

On the Windows platform the Zeus editor has an option to display white space (i.e. View, White sapce menu).

It also has an option to display the file in hex mode (i.e. Tools, Hex Dump menu).

Upvotes: 4

PhiLho

Reputation: 41162

SciTE does that very well with a single keystroke. It is also able to detect the most probably current line ending of the file (in case of mixed lines) and to convert them.
No need to install, lightweight, it can be used as a tool even if you don't want to give up your favorite editor.

Upvotes: 1

Cem Kalyoncu

Reputation: 14603

Write a small program that does the trick. Depending on the language you use it takes between 10 seconds to 1 min. Faster than installing any application for sure. In command line with proper setup PHP

php -q

<?php $t=file_get_contents("filename"); echo str_replace(array("\n", "\r"), array("\\n", "\\r"), $t); ?>

Upvotes: 2

gdelfino

Reputation: 11181

If you have Mathematica, you can try with this command:

ReadList["filename.txt", Record, RecordSeparators -> {}] // InputForm

That will show all the /r and /n

Upvotes: 0

ChrisLively

Reputation: 88072

EmEditor does this. You can also customize what symbols actually display to show them.

Upvotes: 0

dj_segfault

Reputation: 12449

I am a huge fan of JEdit. It's very powerful, and cross-platform. There's a plugin available for it called Whitespace which can do what you want. If that's not enough, there's a hex viewing plugin and a hex editing plugin.

Upvotes: 1

Matthew Talbert

Reputation: 6048

Try Notepad++. It shows all characters. In addition, you could use the utility dos2unix to convert a file to all /n, or "conv" (same link) to convert either way.

Upvotes: 1