Line break

Line break may refer to:

Newline

In computing, a newline, also known as a line ending, end of line (EOL), or line break, is a special character or sequence of characters signifying the end of a line of text and the start of a new line. The actual codes representing a newline vary across operating systems, which can be a problem when exchanging text files between systems with different newline representations.

The concepts of line feed (LF) and carriage return (CR) are closely associated, and can be either considered separately or lumped together. In the physical media of typewriters and printers, two axes of motion, "down" and "across", are needed to create a new line on the page. Although the design of a machine (typewriter or printer) must consider them separately, the abstract logic of software can lump them together as one event. This is why a newline in character encoding can be defined as LF and CR combined into one (CR+LF, CRLF, LF+CR, LFCR).

Two ways to view newlines, both of which are self-consistent, are that newlines 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.

Line break (poetry)

A line break in poetry is the termination of the line of a poem, and the beginning of a new line; within the standard conventions of Western literature, this is usually but not always at the left margin. Line breaks may occur mid-clause, creating enjambment, a term that literally means 'to straddle'. Enjambment "tend[s] to increase the pace of the poem", whereas end-stopped lines, which are lines that break on caesuras (pauses), emphasize these silences and slow the poem down. Line breaks may also serve to signal a change of movement or to suppress or highlight certain internal features of the poem, such as a rhyme or slant rhyme.

Line breaks can be a source of dynamism, providing a method by which poetic forms imbue their contents with intensities and corollary meanings that would not have been possible to the same degree in other forms of text. An example may be taken from E.E. Cummings' poem 'old age sticks'

den Stop

Must
n't Don't

The line break within 'must/n't' allows a double reading of the word as both 'must' and 'mustn't', whereby the reader is made aware that old age both enjoins and forbids the activities of youth. At the same time, the line break subverts 'mustn't': the forbidding of a certain activity—in the poem's context, the moral control the old try to enforce upon the young—only serves to make that activity more enticing.