How to Add CRLF to a String in Python

In Python, CRLF refers to a carriage return and line feed. This pair of characters is used to end lines of text in many computer files, modeled after the actions a typewriter user takes at the end of a line of typing. In Python, you can manually add them to a string using string concatenation operators, or you can specify they should be added to a string you print to the screen or a file.

Different operating systems have different ways to indicate when a text file includes a line break. It's usually done with some mix of the carriage return and line feed characters, which are defined by particular numeric codes.

Traditionally, Microsoft operating systems use a carriage return followed by a line feed, and Unix systems including Linux and recent versions of Apple macOS only use a single line feed. Older Mac systems used only a single carriage return.

Many text processing programs can detect which line endings are used and open any file so that it displays normally, but text can occasionally be mangled if a program isn't set up to make this guess or does so incorrectly. Python is a programming language that runs on a wide variety of systems, so it needs to be able to handle a variety of types of line endings.

Manually add a line ending of your choice to a string in Python using the plus sign concatenation operator, which joins together multiple strings.

For example, "abc" + "def" yields the string "abcdef" as a result. In Python, a carriage return is represented by the string \r and a newline character is represented by the string \n. The backslash is an escape character that tells Python that the following character has a special meaning. To type an actual backslash, put a second backslash before it to have Python escape it as well.

To add a carriage return and newline to a string, add the string "\r\n" to it using the plus sign.

By default, the print operator in Python 2 and the print function in Python 3 add only a newline character, not a carriage return, to the end of each line of text printed to a string or a file. Both Python 2 and Python 3 are widely in use, but they handle printing slightly differently.

On Python 2, you add the correct ending to each line yourself and append a comma to the end of the print statement after the input to suppress Python's own line ending. For example, you could enter 'print "This is a test" + "\r\n"' to print the string "This is a test" with a carriage return and newline.

In Python 3, "print" is a function rather than a special operator. It takes an argument called "end" that specifies the line ending to use. 'Print ("This is a test", end = "\r\n")' prints the sentence with a carriage return and newline character. By default, the end argument is simply a newline character.