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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
>