When do I use the PHP constant PHP EOL

Question

When is it a good idea to use PHP EOL   I sometimes see this in code samples of PHP  Does this handle DOS Mac Unix endline issues

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I d like to throw in an answer that addresses  When not to use it  as it hasn t been covered yet and can imagine it being used blindly and no one noticing the there is a problem till later down the line  Some of this contradicts some of the existing answers somewhat   If outputting to a webpage in HTML  particularly text in  lt textarea gt    lt pre gt  or  lt code gt  you probably always want to use  n and not PHP EOL   The reason for this is that while code may work perform well on one sever - which happens to be a Unix-like platform - if deployed on a Windows host  such the Windows Azure platform  then it may alter how pages are displayed in some browsers  specifically Internet Explorer - some versions of which will see both the  n and  r    I m not sure if this is still an issue since IE6 or not  so it might be fairly moot but seems worth mentioning if it helps people prompt to think about the context  There might be other cases  such as strict XHTML  where suddently outputting  r s on some platforms could cause problems with the output  and I m sure there are other edge cases like that   As noted by someone already  you wouldn t want to use it when returning HTTP headers - as they should always follow the RFC on any platform   I wouldn t use it for something like delimiters on CSV files  as someone has suggested   The platform the sever is running on shouldn t determine the line endings in generated or consumed files

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I prefer to use  n r  Also I am on a windows system and  n works just fine in my experience   Since PHP EOL does not work with regular expressions  and these are the most useful way of dealing with text  then I really never used it or needed to

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You are writing code that predominantly uses single quote strings   echo  A  variable literal that I have  PHP EOL  looks better than  PHP EOL    echo  this other  one    n

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I have a site where a logging-script writes a new line of text to a textfile after an action from the user  who can be using any OS   Using PHP EOL don t seem to be optimal in this case  If the user is on Mac OS and writes to the textfile it will put  n  When opening the textfile on a windows computer it doesn t show a line break  For this reason i use   r n  instead which works when opening the file on any OS

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I just experienced this issue when outputting to a Windows client  Sure  PHP EOL is for server side  but most content output from php is for windows clients  So I have to place my findings here for the next person   A     echo  My Text    PHP EOL       Bad because this just outputs  n  and most versions of windows notepad display this on a single line  and most windows accounting software can t import this type of end of line character   B    echo  My Text  r n      Bad because single quoted php strings do not interpret  r n  C    echo  My Text  r n        Yay it works    Looks correct in notepad  and works when importing the file to other windows software such as windows accounting and windows manufacturing software

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I use the PHP EOL constant in some command line scripts I had to write  I develop on my local Windows machine and then test on a Linux server box  Using the constant meant I didn t have to worry about using the correct line ending for each of the different platforms

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Handy with error log   if you re outputting multiple lines   I ve found a lot of debug statements look weird on my windows install since the developers have assumed unix endings when breaking up strings

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DOS Windows standard  newline  is CRLF     r n  and not LFCR   n r   If we put the latter  it s likely to produce some unexpected  well  in fact  kind of expected   D  behaviors   Nowadays almost all  well written  programs accept the UNIX standard LF   n  for newline code  even mail sender daemons  RFC sets CRLF as newline for headers and message body

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From main php h of PHP version 7 1 1 and version 5 6 30    ifdef PHP WIN32     include  tsrm win32 h      include  win95nt h      ifdef PHP EXPORTS         define PHPAPI   declspec dllexport      else         define PHPAPI   declspec dllimport      endif     define PHP DIR SEPARATOR          define PHP EOL   r n   else     if defined   GNUC     amp  amp    GNUC    gt   4         define PHPAPI   attribute     visibility  default         else         define PHPAPI     endif     define THREAD LS     define PHP DIR SEPARATOR         define PHP EOL   n   endif   As you can see PHP EOL can be   r n   on Windows servers  or   n   on anything else   On PHP versions prior 5 4 0RC8  there were a third value possible for PHP EOL    r   on MacOSX servers   It was wrong and has been fixed on 2012-03-01 with bug 61193   As others already told you  you can use PHP EOL in any kind of output  where any of these values are valid - like  HTML  XML  logs     where you want unified newlines  Keep in mind that it s the server that it s determining the value  not the client  Your Windows visitors will get the value from your Unix server which is inconvenient for them sometimes   I just wanted to show the possibles values of PHP EOL backed by the PHP sources since it hasn t been shown here yet

User · Answer

The definition of PHP EOL is that it gives you the newline character of the operating system you re working on   In practice  you should almost never need this  Consider a few cases    When you are outputting to the web  there really isn t any convention except that you should be consistent  Since most servers are Unixy  you ll want to use a   n  anyway  If you re outputting to a file  PHP EOL might seem like a good idea  However  you can get a similar effect by having a literal newline inside your file  and this will help you out if you re trying to run some CRLF formatted files on Unix without clobbering existing newlines  as a guy with a dual-boot system  I can say that I prefer the latter behavior    PHP EOL is so ridiculously long that it s really not worth using it

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On some system may be useful to use this constant because if  for example  you are sending an email  you can use PHP EOL to have a cross-system script working on more systems    but even if it s useful sometime you can find this constant undefined  modern hosting with latest php engine do not have this problem but I think that a good thing is write a bit code that saves this situation    lt  php   if   defined  PHP EOL          if  strtoupper substr PHP OS 0 3      WIN            define  PHP EOL    r n          elseif  strtoupper substr PHP OS 0 3      MAC            define  PHP EOL    r          elseif  strtoupper substr PHP OS 0 3      DAR            define  PHP EOL    n          else         define  PHP EOL    n                gt    So you can use PHP EOL without problems    obvious that PHP EOL should be used on script that should work on more systems at once otherwise you can use  n or  r or  r n     Note  PHP EOL can be  1  on Unix    LN        n 2  on Mac     CR        r 3  on Windows CR LN     r n   Hope this answer help

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Yes  PHP EOL is ostensibly used to find the newline character in a cross-platform-compatible way  so it handles DOS Unix issues   Note that PHP EOL represents the endline character for the current system  For instance  it will not find a Windows endline when executed on a unix-like system

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PHP EOL  string    The correct  End Of Line  symbol for this platform    Available since PHP 4 3 10 and PHP 5 0 2   You can use this constant when you read or write text files on the server s filesystem   Line endings do not matter in most cases as most software are capable of handling text files regardless of their origin  You ought to be consistent with your code   If line endings matter  explicitly specify the line endings instead of using the constant  For example    HTTP headers must be separated by  r n CSV files should use  r n as row separator

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When jumi  joomla plugin for PHP  compiles your code for some reason it removes all backslashes from your code  Such that something like  csv output      n   becomes  csv output     n    Very annoying bug   Use PHP EOL instead to get the result you were after

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There is one obvious place where it might be useful  when you are writing code that predominantly uses single quote strings  Its arguable as to whether   echo  A  variable literal that I have  PHP EOL  looks better than  PHP EOL    echo  this other  one    n     The art of it is to be consistent  The problem with mix and matching    and    is that when you get long strings  you don t really want to have to go hunting for what type of quote you used    As with all things in life  it depends on the context

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You use PHP EOL when you want a new line  and you want to be cross-platform   This could be when you are writing files to the filesystem  logs  exports  other      You could use it if you want your generated HTML to be readable   So you might follow your  lt br   gt  with a PHP EOL   You would use it if you are running php as a script from cron and you needed to output something and have it be formatted for a screen   You might use it if you are building up an email to send that needed some formatting

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I found PHP EOL very useful for file handling  specially if you are writing multiple lines of content into a file   For example  you have a long string that you want to break into the multiple lines while writing into plain file  Using  r n might not work so simply put PHP EOL into your script and the result is awesome   Check out this simple example below    lt  php   output    This is line 1    PHP EOL              This is line 2    PHP EOL              This is line 3     file    filename txt    if  is writable  file            In our example we re opening  file in append mode         The file pointer is at the bottom of the file hence        that s where  output will go when we fwrite   it      if    handle   fopen  file   a               echo  Cannot open file   file             exit               Write  output to our opened file      if  fwrite  handle   output      FALSE            echo  Cannot write to file   file            exit            echo  Success  content   output  wrote to file   file        fclose  handle     else       echo  The file  file is not writable       gt

User · Answer

No  PHP EOL does not handle endline issues  because the system where you use that constant is not the same system where you send the output to   I would not recommend using PHP EOL at all  Unix Linux use  n  MacOS   OS X changed from  r to  n too and on Windows many applications  especially browsers  can display it correctly too  On Windows  it is also easy change existing client-side code to use  n only and still maintain backward-compatibility  Just change the delimiter for line trimming from  r n to  n and wrap it in a trim   like function

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I am using WebCalendar and found that Mac iCal barfs on importing a generated ics file because the end-of-line is hardcoded in xcal php as   r n   I went in and replaced all occurrences with PHP EOL and now iCal is happy   I also tested it on Vista and Outlook was able to import the file as well  even though the end of line character is   n

[php] When do I use the PHP constant "PHP_EOL"?

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