> For future reference, Notepad will only recognize "\r\n", not "\r" or
> "\n" alone. Also, use Wordpad or Notepad++ instead.

That's been my experience, too.

These are my instructions to staff for downloading a delimited text file from one of our (Unix) web servers to their PC: 

1) Right-click and select "Save Target (or Link) As..."
2) Save the file in desired directory
3) Once the file is saved, open it in WordPad and re-save
4) Optional: import the file into MS Access

After step 3, they can also view it okay in Notepad.  Opening and re-saving the file in WordPad apparently converts the Unix line-endings to the Windows line-endings.

-- Michael


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Gabriel Farrell
> Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 12:09 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] data export help: line breaks on tab-delimited
> download
> 
> For future reference, Notepad will only recognize "\r\n", not "\r" or
> "\n" alone. Also, use Wordpad or Notepad++ instead.
> 
> Further reading:
> http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vclanguage/thread/cba503b1-a0e2-
> 4a64-a970-f735c5bc1c90
> http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/showthread.php?t=9069
> 
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 7:57 PM, Ken Irwin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Jonathan's questions were right on target. I was opening the files in the
> standard MS Notepad editor, and it was not observing line breaks. When I went
> to go open the files in MiniTab they were just fine. (Changing the files to
> .txt and text/plain did *not* fix the problem in Notepad, and I do wonder what
> it would take to make that program happy, but in this case it doesn't much
> matter.)
> >
> > Thanks for the help
> > Ken
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Jonathan Rochkind
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 3:41 PM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] data export help: line breaks on tab-delimited
> download
> >
> > line breaks don't appear when you view it with what software?
> >
> > Can you have your browser save it to disk after it prompts you to do so,
> > and open with a reliable text editor you know how to use and confirm if
> > \n is really still in the file or not?
> >
> > If you are viewing it in your web brower, then your web browser is
> > probably deciding to display it as HTML. The line breaks are probably
> > still there, the web browser is just displaying as HTML. Web browsers
> > aren't great places to view text.  If you are viewing it after saving it
> > to disk, then your web browser probably won't know to display as text
> > unless the filename ends in ".txt".  If you are viewing it without
> > saving to disk (but then why are you using
> > Content-Disposition:attachment?), then make sure you're still setting
> > the content-type appropriately; and you may need to make the filename
> > end in .txt anyway.
> >
> > The line breaks are probably still there, your web browser is just
> > rendering the file as html rather than txt, is my guess.
> >
> > On 1/11/2011 3:29 PM, Ken Irwin wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I've got a dataset that I'm trying to make exportable for MiniTab, etc.
> It's tab-delimited and lines end with "\n".
> >>
> >> When I serve it up as "text/plain" and view it in my web browser, it works
> just fine and all the line breaks are in the right places.
> >>
> >> When I send the header to make it a downloadable "attachment":
> >> Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="categories.tab"
> >> Then there are no line breaks at all - it's all one line, and the line-
> breaks don't appear.
> >>
> >> I tried "\r" instead, and that didn't work either.
> >>
> >> Any idea what I might be doing wrong here?
> >>
> >> Thanks
> >> Ken
> >>
> >