Carriage return

In computing, the carriage return (CR) is one of the control characters in ASCII code or EBCDIC that commands a printer or other sort of display to move the position of the cursor to the first position on the same line. It is mostly used along with line feed, a move to the next line, while carriage return precedes line feed to indicate new line.

In ASCII, it is defined as 13 in decimal and 0D in hexadecimal.

In the C programming language and many other languages influenced by it, \\r denotes this character.

The term derives from the fact that when this control character was sent to early printers, it would physically return the carriage, similar to the operation of a typewriter.

See also

• Line feed