简而言之:

回车符(\r或0xD):从同一行开始控制。 换行(\n或0xA):控制从下一行开始。 表单提要(\f或0xC):控制从下一页开始。

更多的细节和更多的控制字符可以在下面的页面找到:控制字符

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。

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.

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.

“\n”是换行字符。这意味着结束当前行，并为正在阅读它的任何人转到新的行。

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.