What does Visual Studio mean by normalize inconsistent line endings

Question

Visual Studio occasionally tells me      The line endings in the following files are not consistent  Do you want to normalize the line endings    It then gives me a drop down with different standards or something  such as Windows  Mac  Unix  and a couple of Unicode ones   What does this mean and what is going to happen if I click Yes

User · Answer

There a an add-in for Visual Studio 2008 that converts the end of line format when a file is saved  You can download it here  http   grebulon com software stripem php

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What that usually means is that you have lines ending with something other than a carriage return line feed pair  It often happens when you copy and paste from a web page into the code editor   Normalizing the line endings is just making sure that all of the line ending characters are consistent  It prevents one line from ending in  r n and another ending with  r or  n  the first is the Windows line end pair  while the others are typically used for Mac or Linux files   Since you re developing in Visual Studio  you ll obviously want to choose  Windows  from the drop down   -

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It means that  for example  some of your lines of text with a  lt Carriage Return gt  lt Linefeed gt   the Windows standard   and some end with just a  lt Linefeed gt   the Unix standard    If you click  yes  these the end-of-lines in your source file will be converted to have all the same format   This won t make any difference to the compiler  because end-of-lines count as mere whitespace   but it might make some difference to other tools  e g  the  diff  on your version control system

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To turn the option ON OFF  follow the steps below from menu bar   Tools   Options   Environment   Documents   Check for consistent line endings on load

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If you are using Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2012   Go to menu File   Advanced Save Options   select Line endings type as Windows  CR LF

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When you copy paste something from web  you might get the inconsistent line endings   In order to fix this  you can use Visual studio extension  Line Endings Unifier  which can make line ending consistent automatically while saving file

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The Wikipedia newline article might help you out  Here is an excerpt      The different newline conventions often cause text files that have been transferred between    systems of different types to be displayed incorrectly  For example  files originating on    Unix or Apple Macintosh systems may appear as a single long line on some programs running on    Microsoft Windows  Conversely  when viewing a file originating from a Windows computer on a    Unix system  the extra CR may be displayed as  M or  at the end of each line or as a    second line break

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Line endings also called newline  end of line  EOL  or line break is a control character or sequence of control characters in a character encoding specification  e g  ASCII or EBCDIC  that is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one  Some text editors set implement this special character when you press the Enter key  The Carriage Return  Line Feed characters are ASCII representations for the end of a line  EOL   They will end the current line of a string  and start a new one  However  at the operating system level  they are treated differently   The Carriage Return   quot CR quot   character  ASCII 13 0x0D   r   Moves the cursor to the beginning of the line without advancing to the next line  This character is used as the new line character in Commodore and Early Macintosh operating systems  Mac OS 9 and earlier    The Line Feed   quot LF quot   character  ASCII 10 0x0A   n   Moves the cursor down to the next line without returning to the beginning of the line  This character is used as the new line character in Unix based systems  Linux  macOS X  Android  etc    The Carriage  Return Line  Feed   quot CRLF quot   character  0x0D0A   r n   This is actually two ASCII characters and is a combination of the CR and LF characters  It moves the cursor both down to the next line and to the beginning of that line  This character is used as the new line character in most other non-Unix operating systems  including Microsoft Windows and Symbian OS    Normalizing inconsistent line endings in Visual Studio means selecting one character type to be used for all your files  It could be   The Carriage Return Line Feed   quot CRLF quot   character The Line Feed   quot LF quot   character The Carriage Return   quot CR quot   character  However  you can set this in a better way using  gitattributes file in your root directory to avoid conflicts when you move your files from one Operating system to the other  Simply create a new file called  gitattributes in the root directory of your application  touch  gitattributes  And add the following in it    Enforce Unix newlines   text auto eol lf  This enforces the Unix line feed line ending character  Note  If this is an already existing project  simply run this command to update the files for the application using the newly defined line ending as specified in the  gitattributes  git rm --cached -r   git reset --hard  That s all  I hope this helps

User · Answer

Some lines end with  n   Some other lines end with  r n   Visual Studio suggests you to make all lines end the same

User · Answer

The file you are editing has been edited with some other editor that does not use the same line endings  resulting in a file with mixed line endings   The ASCII characters in use for line endings are   CR  Carriage Return LF  Line Feed  Windows   CRLF Mac OS 9 or earlier   CR Unix   LF

User · Answer

It s not just Visual Studio    It d be any tools that read the files  compilers  linkers  etc  that would have to be able to handle it   In general  for software development  we accept the multiplatform line ending issue  but let the version control software deal with it

[visual-studio] What does Visual Studio mean by normalize inconsistent line endings?

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