Why won't \n give me a new line?

I am trying to write my data to a text file but the usual \n is not giving me a new line!

    fid1 = fopen(filedesignation,'w');
    fprintf(fid1,'%s, ',title1);
    fprintf(fid1,'%4.2f, %4.2f, %4.2f, %4.2f, %4.2f\n',DataMatrix);
    fclose(fid1);

When I try printing this to the command window, the \n works, but not when I try and write to a file. Why?!

How can I get a line return in my text file if this doesn't work?

[Stephen23]

The simplest solution is to open the file in text mode:

fid1 = fopen(filedesignation,'wt');
                               ^ you need this!

On Windows this will automatically convert all \n to the required newlines characters.

[Mohammad Bhat]

That helped me too, thanks ...

[Shahrokh Abbasi-Rad]

Awesome. the problem was only a 't' :))))

[Fernando Rojano]

Great!

[Priya Mittal]

Change the 'w' parameter in fopen to 'wt'. Worked for me.

[Jan]

Fortunately even NotePad shipped with modern Windows 10 is able to display \n correctly now.

Answer 1

[Jan]

It works perfectly when you write it to a file also. But the Windows NotePad ("Editor" in German) fails to display the linebreaks correctly. But Matlab's editor, Word, NotePad++, WordPad, (X)Emacs (under Linux and Windows), Alpha (on MacOS-9 !), BBEdit, vi, etc. display the \n line break correctly even without the \r.

When you open the file in the 'wt' mode, \n is converted to \r\n automatically, but this can have certain unexpected side effects. E.g. the number of characters obtained by ftell can differ from the number of bytes the file has. Reading by fgets will be slower, because all control characters are considered on the fly, e.g. backspaces and ^Z as end-of-file. In addition the created results differ between Windows and Linux. So I'd prefer to retire NotePad, install NotePad++ or WordPad as standard viewer of txt files and prefer the \n linebreaks as Matlab's editor does for several years now.

[Evangelos Stefanidis]

Thank you Jan, I had totally forgot about Notepad++ ! Also Thank you Katie for asking this question, I had hard time for a while and I was only opening the .txt files with my results through matlab... lol.

Answer 2

[Cedric]

You will need \r\n for producing a carriage return and a new line. This is a well documented issue between UNIX-based and Windows operating systems.

[Yang Hu]

Brilliant

[Keqin Xu]

Files created this way cannot be properly read using ...'deliminator','\n'...

An example is attached.

[Walter Roberson]

the success is going to depend on which command you are passing that parameter to and potentially on how you open the file.

Generally telling a function that the delimiter is \n is an interface contract: you are making a promise about the file and the function is permitted to take you at your word.

My guess looking at that file is that you would use

  parts = regexp( fileread('Run_01.txt'), '\r?\n', 'split');
  if isempty(parts{end})
    parts(end) = [];
  end

that will work whether the file has cr lf or lf only. It will not work for cr only though. This code will not remove interior empty lines. The if at the bottom is to handle the fact that if the file ends in newline then the split process thinks that there is an empty line after it. Files are permitted to either just end without a newline or else to end in a newline (that is to say that there is no standard as to whether newline is a line separator or else a line terminator .)

Answer 3

[Camilo Rocha]

You just have to put 'wt' when you call fopen function

fid1 = fopen(filename,'wt')

Answer 4

[Roxanne de la Garza]

I put my \n at the beginning instead of the end and it worked for me. fprintf(fid1,'\n %4.2f, %4.2f, %4.2f, %4.2f, %4.2f',DataMatrix);

[Matthes Müller]

Worked for me also, thank you so much!

[ustin yanu]

worked for me too, thx, wonder why?

i have this

elseif x<1300
    a=x-1200;  
        b = [ fix(a/1e+2)-1E+2*fix(a/1e+4) rem(a, 1e+2)];
        fprintf('\nYou entered %d:%d%d',b)
              fprintf('\nThe equivalent time based on a 12-hour clock is %d:%d%d',b)
              disp('PM')

Answer 5

[Aasim]

Works well.. Thanks!

Answer 6

[Milad Hasani]

As a suggestion, you can use:

\newline

[Walter Roberson]

\newline is for Latex, and will not work for fprintf() or sprintf()

fprintf('abc\newlinedef')

abc
ewlinedef