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Stop Requiring CRLF Line Endings

xecutive Summary Let's all agree to fix our software so that it does not require the CR in the CRLF end-of-line mark. In other words, let's accept inputs that using only a bare NL as the end-of-line.

By the age of Multix and Unix in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most people recognized that using CRLF as a NL was silly, and so the task of sending separate CR and LF characters was relegated to the device drivers for teleprinters, since that is where work-arounds for hardware quirks belong. Nevertheless, a minority of machines still insist on sending a CR together with their NLs, the official Unicode name for U+000a is still LF, and various protocols (HTTP, SMTP, CSV) still "require" CRLF at the end of each line. More recently, now that a majority of consumer devices run an OS other than Windows, the platform has become quite forgiving and is happy to accept bare LFs as the line terminator.

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