reading win and mac text files on linux

[Martin Baxter]

>>Martin Baxter wrote:
>> I expected line endings to be converted

>  Richard Gaskin:
>I had the impression that using this:
>
>   get url ("file:"&tMyPath)
>
>....would translate line endings unless the URL is remote (i.e., using
>"http" instead of "file").  It might be good to check that against older
>versions of the engine and the docs to ensure it's not a a bug.
>
>This may work well:
>
>   open file tMyPath for text read
>   read from file tMyPath until EOF
>   close file tMyPath
>

For the record, this apparently behaves exactly the same as:

 put url "file:"&tMyPath into y

at least so far as converting line-endings is concerned.

i.e. on Mac and Windows, all possible line endings are automatically
converted, but on Linux (and presumably all Unixes) there is no conversion.

I now suspect this is a legacy issue rather than by design. When Metacard
added support for non-Unix platforms, the non-LF line-endings would have
had to be catered for. But changing the existing routines, originally aimed
at The Unix platform only, would have broken existing user-code, hence the
apparent anomaly. - Just a guess.

Martin Baxter