notepad doesn't recognize new line character

Hi,

I'm not sure this is really a programming issue, but I will give it a try here. I'm outputting data formatted kind of like a table to a file. When opened with notepad, the data is all on one line and where there should be a new line a block character is present (showing that it's an unrecognized character or something). When opened with wordpad, it displays just fine. Would there be something wrong in my code? I'm simply output '\n' when i want a new line.

Did you open the file as binary or text? If it's binary, then yes, I would expect it to "not work right". Newline in Windows is CR+LF, whilst C itself considers LF as a newline, so in a binary file, newlines stay as LF, but in text-files, it converts to CR+LF.

--
Mats

Thanks. How would I know how the file is opened? The output file is given as a command line argument and ends with .txt...

Presumably your application uses fopen() to open the file. The second argument to fopen() is a "mode" parameter, usually containing "a", "r" or "w". If it also has "b" in it, then it's a binary file (e.g. fopen("blah.txt", "wb") would open blah.txt as a binary file).

--
Mats

No, i only have a w in the file, so I don't know what's going on.

Here is the function that outputs it to the file:

Code:

void output_maze(char *maze, int xWidth, int yWidth, FILE *mazeFile)
{
	int new_line_counter = 1;  		//-index tracker
	int full_size = xWidth*yWidth - 1;	//-full size of array	
	for (int i=full_size; i>=0; i--)
	{
		//-if at the end of row, print new line after char
		if (new_line_counter%xWidth==0) 
		{
			fprintf(mazeFile, "%c\n", maze[i]);
		}
		else
		{
			fprintf(mazeFile, "%c ", maze[i]);
		}
		new_line_counter++;		//-increment the counter
	}
}

opening the file:

Code:

FILE *mazeFile = fopen(fileName,"w");

Which compiler are you using - cygwin-gcc ?

Yes! cygwin-gcc

Try opening the file in textpad. Notepad wont recognize that the file was in linux, but textpad will.

I'm running cygwin on windows. If the same program was run and compiled on linux, would it work? And yes, it works perfectly in wordpad.

When you installed cygwin, you had the choice of UNIX or DOS line endings. So even despite it being a windows machine, you end up with files which are just \n terminated.

A quick-fix would be to use
unix2dos oldfile newfile

This is an assignment, so do you think when i turn it in it won't matter (as in they have it set up correctly)?

This is an assignment, so do you think when i turn it in it won't matter (as in they have it set up correctly)?

If your marker compiles the program for himself or herself, or uses Unix or Max OS X, or uses a line ending aware text editor, it might not matter at all.