I am writing code that runs in Windows and outputs a text file that later becomes the input to a program in Linux. This program behaves incorrectly when given files that have newlines that are CR+LF rather than just LF.
I know that I can use tools like dos2unix, but I'd like to skip the extra step. Is it possible to get a C++ program in Windows to use the Linux newline instead of the Windows one?
A much cleaner solution is to use the ASCII escape sequence for the LF character (decimal 10): '\012' or '\x0A' represents an explicit single line feed regardless of platform.
Note that this at least on some compilers does not work; for example, on MSVC 2019 16.11.6, both '\012' and '\x0A' get translated to carriage return and line feed. It also does not matter there whether a string literal ("\012") or a char literal ('\012') is used.
This method also avoids string length surprises, as '\n' can expand to two characters. But so can multibyte unicode characters, in UTF8, when written directly into a string literal in the source code.
Note also that '\r' is the platform-independent code for a single carriage return (decimal 13). The '\f' character is not the line feed, but rather the form feed (decimal 12), which is not a newline on any platform I am aware of. C does not offer a single-character backslash escape for the line feed, thus the need for the longer octal or hexadecimal escapes.
