ASCII 13 — CR

Carriage Return (CR) moves the cursor to the beginning of the current line, named after the physical carriage on typewriters that slid back to the left margin. Written as '\r', CR combined with LF forms the standard Windows and Internet newline sequence (CR+LF, '\r\n'). This convention dates back to teletype machines that required both operations — returning to the line start and advancing to the next line — as separate mechanical actions. HTTP headers and email protocols mandate CR+LF for line endings.

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, Carriage Return is assigned code point 13 in decimal (0x0D hexadecimal, 015 octal, 00001101 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 Carriage Return works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.