line separator : Java Glossary

line separator
aka line terminator, newline, carriage return. Different operating systems use different conventions to mark the ends of lines in text files. Note the spelling. Young Americans are tempted to spell it incorrectly as seperater.

If you use the readLine and println methods, Java automatically deals with the platform differences for you.

The last line in a file may or may not have a line separator.

I am not sure what the best technique for writing Unix-convention \n files on Windows is. You could try setting the line.separator system property, though Oracle recommends against it.

// prepare to produce Unix-format text files on a Windows machine
System.setProperty( "line.separator", "\n" );

Learning More

Oracle’s Javadoc on Java 1.7 System.lineSeparator : available:

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