Writing Unix style text file in C#

dan6470 picture dan6470 · Oct 20, 2011 · Viewed 13k times · Source

I'm trying to write a text file with Unix-style newlines with my C# program.

For some reason the following code doesn't work:

TextWriter fileTW = ...

fileTW.NewLine = "\n";

fileTW.WriteLine("Hello World!");

Neither does this:

TextWriter fileTW = ...

fileTW.Write("Hello World! + \n");

In both cases the '\n' is being replaced with '\r\n', which I don't want! I've been verifying this with a hex editor, which shows each line ending in 0x0D0A.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

EDIT:

Sorry everyone, false alarm!

Allow me to explain...

My TextWriter was writing to a MemoryStream, which was then being added to a tar archive using SharpZLib. It turns out that by extracting the text file using WinZIP, it was replacing every instance of \n with \r\n. If I copy the same tar archive to my Ubuntu machine and extract there, only the \n is there. Weird!

Sorry if I wasted anyone's time! Thanks!

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Oct 20, 2011

I'm unable to reproduce this. Sample code:

using System;
using System.IO;

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        using (TextWriter fileTW = new StreamWriter("test.txt"))
        {
            fileTW.NewLine = "\n";            
            fileTW.WriteLine("Hello");
        }
    }
}

Afterwards:

c:\users\jon\Test>dir test.txt
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 4062-9385

 Directory of c:\users\jon\Test

20/10/2011  21:24                 6 test.txt
               1 File(s)              6 bytes

Note the size - 6 bytes - that's 5 for "Hello" and one for the "\n". Without setting the NewLine property, it's 7 (two for "\r\n").

Can you come up with a similar short but complete program demonstrating the problem? How are you determining that your file contains "\r\n" afterwards?