ASCII 10 — LF

Line Feed (LF) moves the cursor down one line and is the standard newline character in Unix, Linux, and macOS, written as '\n' in escape sequences. Windows uses a two-character CR+LF sequence instead, while classic Mac OS used CR alone — this incompatibility has caused countless cross-platform bugs throughout computing history. Git provides core.autocrlf settings to manage line ending conversions between platforms. Network protocols like HTTP and SMTP mandate CR+LF regardless of the host operating system.

Whitespace characters create visual separation and structural formatting in text without rendering a visible glyph. Whitespace handling is a critical design consideration across programming languages, markup systems, and data formats: Python uses indentation for block structure, HTML collapses consecutive spaces into one, and tools like linters flag inconsistent whitespace patterns. The interplay between spaces, tabs, line feeds, and other whitespace characters has produced some of the longest-running formatting debates in the entire history of software development.

In the ASCII encoding table, Line Feed is assigned code point 10 in decimal (0x0A hexadecimal, 012 octal, 00001010 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Line Feed works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.