Is \r\n considered as two or four characters?

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- - 10 Jul 2005 11:33 GMT

Is \r\n considered as two or four characters?

While reading an RFC, it stated that "the maximum length of a message
shall not exceed 512 characters, including the trailing CR-LF. Thus,
there are 510 characters allowed for the command and parameters".

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Stefan Schulz - 10 Jul 2005 11:36 GMT

> Is \r\n considered as two or four characters?

Two. You only encode it so the compiler knows you mean the normally
unprintable character, and replaces it in your string.

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Boudewijn Dijkstra - 10 Jul 2005 13:45 GMT

> Is \r\n considered as two or four characters?

In this case you use four characters to describe two characters.

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Paul Bilnoski - 10 Jul 2005 16:14 GMT

> Is \r\n considered as two or four characters?
>
> While reading an RFC, it stated that "the maximum length of a message
> shall not exceed 512 characters, including the trailing CR-LF. Thus,
> there are 510 characters allowed for the command and parameters".

It is considered two characters.
The backslash escapes the following character (sequence) to have special
meaning, and to be a single character. Look up character escape
sequences in about any Java book for more info. Unicode escape sequences
like \u0035 are also considered a single character but they take six to
write them.
--Paul

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Owen Jacobson - 10 Jul 2005 23:11 GMT

1459? *grin*

"\r\n" is encoded as the octet sequence 0D 0A, I believe (that might be
backwards and I can't be arsed to check) after the escape sequences are
turned into characters and the characters into ASCII (as per the RFC).

(You can get away with using UTF-8 instead of ascii without breaking
existing clients too much.)

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Is \r\n considered as two or four characters?

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