6 Different Ways to Add New Lines in C# and ASP.NET

Dot Net C# is one of the greatest managed programming languages. A managed programming language interprets or builds your code and transforms it into another executable format to be executed on your operating system.

For example, in .Net, when you write some code and try to build it, the Just-in-Time JIT compilation compiles your code and transforms it to machine instructions, which then will be executed by Common Language Runtime CLR. 

For more information about CLR, see Common Language Runtime.

In this post, we will discuss 6 different ways to insert a new line in C# and test our code on a console application, and we will emphasize the relationship between one or more of these ways with what we discussed earlier about CLR.

The 6 ways to insert new lines in C# are as follows:

1. Using parameter-less Console.WriteLine() to add a new line.
2. Injecting new lines within the same string.
3. Using Environment.NewLine.
4. Using the ASCII literal of a new line.
5. Using \r\n to insert a new line.
6. Inserting new lines in ASP.NET for an existing string.

Using Parameter-less Console.WriteLine() to Add a New Line

The easiest way to inject a new line in a console application is to use a parameter-less Console.WriteLine(). For example:

<br>Console.WriteLine("This is a line");<br>Console.WriteLine();<br>Console.WriteLine("This is another line");<br> <br>Console.WriteLine("This is a line");<br>Console.WriteLine();<br>Console.WriteLine("This is another line");<br>

As mentioned in Microsoft's Documentation, running a Console.WriteLine() without any parameters translates to a line terminator, as shown in the next screenshot.

The above code, will let every Console.WriteLine() call insert 2 lines. So if you passed a string to any Console.WriteLine(), a new line will be added in addition to the current input string. Likewise, the parameter-less Console.WriteLine() will actually enter two lines instead of just one.

The output of the above code will look like this:

Injecting New Lines within the Same String

The second way to insert a new line in a string is to place \n within your string. For example:

<br>Console.WriteLine("This is a line.\nThis is another line.");<br>

The above code will run as shown in the next screenshot:

Using the ASCII Literal of a New Line

This method is similar to the \n. But instead, you can use the ASCII literal that represents a new line. For example:

<br>Console.WriteLine("This is a line. \x0AThis is another line.");<br>

This new line ASCII literal \x0A will also insert a new line in the string above.

Using \r\n to Insert a New Line

You can also inject \r\n in a string to insert a new line. For example:

<br>Console.WriteLine("This is a line. \r\nThis is another line.");<br>

The above code will successfully insert a new line using \r\n. But what's the difference between \r\n and \n?

\n represents a new line, while \r represents a carriage return, which means the cursor will be moved to the very far left position. For more information, see Difference between \r and \r\n.

Inserting New Lines in ASP.NET for an Existing String

Line breaks in HTML or ASP.NET is represented by the < br /> tag. In some cases, you will need to convert an existing string that contains new lines to a valid HTML code that includes < br /> tags. To convert a string's new lines to HTML line breaks you can use the following method that leverages regular expressions.

<br>public static string ConvertToLineBreaks(this string inputString) {<br>      Regex regEx = new Regex(@"(\\n|\\r)+");<br>      return regEx.Replace(inputString, "<br/>");<br>}<br><br><br>

The above method is designed to be an extension method. Include the method in a separate file, then include it in your code through a using statement then call the method as follows:

<br>string html = inputString.ConvertToLineBreaks();<br>

You can test the above regular expression on this link.

If you have any questions or want to improve any of the above methods, feel free to drop me a comment.