Editing Newline (section)

== Interpretation ==
Two ways to view newlines, both of which are [[self-consistent]], are that newlines either ''separate'' lines or that they ''terminate'' lines. If a newline is considered a separator, there will be no newline after the last line of a file. Some programs have problems processing the last line of a file if it is not terminated by a newline. On the other hand, programs that expect newline to be used as a separator will interpret a final newline as starting a new (empty) line. Conversely, if a newline is considered a terminator, all text lines including the last are expected to be terminated by a newline. If the final character sequence in a text file is not a newline, the final line of the file may be considered to be an improper or incomplete text line, or the file may be considered to be improperly truncated.

In text intended primarily to be read by humans using software which implements the [[word wrap]] feature, a newline character typically only needs to be stored if a line break is required independent of whether the next word would fit on the same line, such as between [[paragraph]]s and in vertical lists. Therefore, in the logic of [[word processor|word processing]] and most [[text editor]]s, newline is used as a ''paragraph break'' and is known as a "hard return", in contrast to "soft returns" which are dynamically created to implement word wrapping and are changeable with each display instance. In many applications a separate [[control character]] called "manual line break" exists for forcing line breaks inside a single paragraph. The [[glyph]] for the control character for a hard return is usually a [[pilcrow]] (¶), and for the manual line break is usually a carriage return arrow (↵).