这些是非印刷字符，与“新行”的概念有关。\n是换行。\r是回车。在不同的平台上，相对于有效的新行，它们有不同的含义。在windows中，新行是\r\n。在linux中，\n。在mac中，\r。

实际上，将它们放在任何字符串中，都会对字符串的打印结果产生影响。

在老式的纸质打印机终端上，前进到下一行需要两个动作:将打印头移回水平扫描范围的起点(回车)和前进正在打印的纸卷(换行)。

由于我们不再使用纸质打印机终端，这些动作已经无关紧要了，但用来发出信号的字符以各种形式存在。

when I was an apprentice in the Royal Signals many (50) years ago, teletypes and typewriters had "Carriage" with the printing head on them. When you pressed RETURN the Carriage would fly to the left. Hence Carriage Return (CR). You could just return the Carriage, but on mechanical typewriters, you'd use the Lever (much like a tremolo lever on an electric guitar) which would also do the Line Feed. Your next question is why would you not want the line feed? heh heh well in those days to delete characters we'd do a CR then use a Tip-ex-like paper in between the hammerheads and paper and type the same keys to over-write with white ink. Some fancy typewriters had a key you could press. So there you go.

作为补充，

1、回车:这是打印机术语，意思是将打印位置更改到当前行的开头。在计算机世界中，它在大多数情况下表示返回到当前行的开始，但很少表示新行。

2、换行:这是打印机术语，意思是把纸张往前行。因此换行和换行一起使用，在新行开始时开始打印。在计算机世界中，它通常与换行符具有相同的含义。

3、表单提要:这是一个打印机术语，我喜欢这个帖子中的解释。

如果您正在为一台20世纪80年代风格的打印机编程，它将弹出 纸，开始新的一页。你几乎可以肯定永远不需要 它。 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_feed

它几乎已经过时了，你可以参考转义序列\f - form feed -它到底是什么?详细说明。

注意，我们可以在某些平台上使用CR或LF或CRLF来代表换行符，但在其他一些平台上它们不能代表换行符。详见wiki Newline。

LF: Multics, Unix and Unix-like systems (Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, AIX, Xenix, etc.), BeOS, Amiga, RISC OS, and others CR: Commodore 8-bit machines, Acorn BBC, ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Apple II family, Oberon, the classic Mac OS up to version 9, MIT Lisp Machine and OS-9 RS: QNX pre-POSIX implementation 0x9B: Atari 8-bit machines using ATASCII variant of ASCII (155 in decimal) CR+LF: Microsoft Windows, DOS (MS-DOS, PC DOS, etc.), DEC TOPS-10, RT-11, CP/M, MP/M, Atari TOS, OS/2, Symbian OS, Palm OS, Amstrad CPC, and most other early non-Unix and non-IBM OSes LF+CR: Acorn BBC and RISC OS spooled text output.

Consider an IBM 1403 impact printer. CR moved the print head to the start of the line, but did NOT advance the paper. This allowed for "overprinting", placing multiple lines of output on one line. Things like underlining were achieved this way, as was BOLD print. LF advanced the paper one line. If there was no CR, the next line would print as a staggered-step because LF didn't move the print head. FF advanced the paper to the next page. It typically also moved the print head to the start of the first line on the new page, but you might need CR for that. To be sure, most programmers coded CRFF instead of CRLF at the end of the last line on a page because an extra CR created by FF wouldn't matter.

看看维基百科:

基于ASCII或兼容字符集的系统分别使用LF(换行，'\n'， 0x0A，十进制10)或CR(回车，'\r'， 0x0D，十进制13)，或CR后跟LF (CR+LF, 0x0D 0x0A)。这些字符是基于打印机命令的:换行指示一行纸应该从打印机输出，回车指示打印机的回车应返回到当前行的开头。