What form of encoding do you type into System.out.println in Java?

Question

I am trying to learn encoding, so please bear with me.

Using an online encoding tool such as this one, I can see that the data

a
b

can be represented

in Ascii/ANSI as:

a
b

in Hex as:

610d0a62

in base64 as:

YQ0KYg==

But in Java if I need to print this data to the screen I need to use the command

System.out.println("a\r\nb");

What form of encoding is \r\n?

In other words, is it fair to say that \r\n is the keyboard representation for the ascii

a
b

Are you asking about what type of encoding escape sequences are? Or are you trying to encode those escape sequences into something? — Julian
– Julian, Commented Jul 9, 2015 at 23:03

Jack · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-09 23:05:12Z

1

It's not a real encoding, is an escape character + a character.

It is used to define common ASCII characters which are not printable. The list available to Java is here.

Basically \r is interpreted as the value 0x0D or 13 in decimal, which is the carriage return.

answered Jul 9, 2015 at 23:05

Jack

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2 Comments

Is it fair to say that \r is the keyboard representation of \u0x0D

It's just a norm chosen many years ago when they required to give a textual representation to ASCII values that didn't have one.