Carriage return - Definition and Overview

Originally, carriage return was the term for the key, lever, or mechanism in general that would cause the cylinder on which the paper was held (the carriage) to return to the right after a line of text had been typed, and would often move it down a line as well. The symbol ↵ derives from this, as it or variants thereof were often found on the carriage return key (the analog analogue of the modern Enter key).

In computing, the carriage return (CR) is one of the control characters in ASCII code, unicode or EBCDIC that commands a printer or other sort of display to move the position of the cursor to the first position on the same line. It is mostly used along with line feed, a move to the next line, while carriage return precedes line feed to indicate new line. The term derives from the above usage, as early printers often closely resembled typewriters; this control character would activate a physical carriage-return mechanism.

In ASCII and unicode, it is defined as 13 in decimal and 0D in hexadecimal.

Some standards (for example HTML) treat carrige return and its relative line feed as whitespace.

In the C programming language and many other languages influenced by it, \r denotes this character.

See also

• Line feed
• CRLF

References

• http://cq-pan