Your application will run on more than one platform. Each platform uses a different end-of-line (EOL) character. You want your code to output the correct EOL character without having to write code to handle the EOL character specially for each platform.
The .NET Framework provides the
Environment.NewLine
constant, which represents a
newline on the given platform. This is the newline string used by all
of the framework-provided WriteLine
methods
internally (including Console
,
Debug
, and Trace
).
There are a few different scenarios when this could be useful:
Formatting a block of text with newlines embedded within it:
// 1) Remember to use Environment.NewLine on every block of text // we format that we want platform correct newlines inside of string line; line = String.Format("FirstLine {0} SecondLine {0} ThirdLine {0}", Environment.NewLine); // get a temp file to work with string file = Path.GetTempFileName( ); FileStream stream = File.Create(file); byte[] bytes = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(line); stream.Write(bytes,0,bytes.Length); // close the file stream.Close( ); // remove the file (good line to set a breakpoint to check out the file // we created) File.Delete(file);
You need to use a different newline character than the default one
used by StreamWriter
(which happens to be
Environment.NewLine
). You can set the newline that
a StreamWriter
will use once so that all
WriteLine
s performed by the
StreamWriter
use that newline instead of having to
manually do it each time:
// 2) Set up a text writer and tell it to use the certain newline // string // get a new temp file file = Path.GetTempFileName( ); line = "Double spaced line"; StreamWriter streamWriter = new StreamWriter(file); // make this always write out double lines streamWriter.NewLine = Environment.NewLine + Environment.NewLine; // WriteLine on this stream will automatically use the newly specified // newline sequence (double newline in our case) streamWriter.WriteLine(line); streamWriter.WriteLine(line); streamWriter.WriteLine(line); // close the file streamWriter.Close( ); // remove the file (good line to set a breakpoint to check out the file // we created) File.Delete(file);
Normal WriteLine
calls:
// 3) Just use any of the normal WriteLine methods as they use the // Environment.NewLine by default line = "Default line"; Console.WriteLine(line);
Environment.NewLine
allows you to have peace of
mind whether the platform is using
or
as the newline or possibly something else.
Your code will be doing things the right way for each platform.
One word of caution here: if you are interoperating with a
non-Windows operating system via SOAP and Web Services, the
Environment.NewLine
defined here might not be
accurate for a stream you send to or receive from that other
operating system. Of course, if you are doing Web Services, newlines
aren’t your biggest concern.