Carriage return

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A carriage return, sometimes known as a cartridge return and often shortened to CR, <CR> or return, is a control character or mechanism used to reset a device's position to the beginning of a line of text. It is closely associated with the line feed and newline concepts, although it can be considered separately in its own right.

Computers[change | change source]

In computing, the carriage return is the name of a computer character that directs a printer or screen display to return to the start of a line when printing or displaying text. The origin of its name is as you'd expect: it told a teletype that its print carriage (the cylinder that held the paper) should return to the beginning of a line. On some systems, such as older Macintoshes, it also creates a new line, like the line feed character.