Line terminators on Windows and UNIX

On Windows™ platforms, DOS formatted text files use CR/LF as line terminators. You can manage these type of files with the base.Channel class.

By default, on both Windows and UNIX™ platforms, when records are read from a DOS file with the base.Channel class, the CR/LF line terminator is removed. When a record is written to a file on Windows, the lines are terminated with CR/LF in the file; on UNIX, the lines are terminated with LF only.

To avoid the automatic translation of CR/LF on Windows, you can use the b option of the openFile() and openPipe() methods. You can combine the b option with r or w, based on the read or write operations that you want to do.

CALL ch.openFile( "mytext.txt", "rb" )

On Windows, when lines are read with the b option, only LF is removed from CR/LF line terminators; CR will be copied as a character part of the last field. In contrast, when lines are written with the b option, LF characters will not be converted to CR/LF.

On UNIX, writing lines with or without the binary mode option does not matter.