Difference between \r and \n

Question

What is the difference between \\r and \\n in a regular expression?

Can someone explain it with an example?

Answer 1

Normally \r represents a carriage return character (ASCII 0x0d), and \n is a newline character (ASCII 0x0a). This page has a list of all the special characters, quoted here for completeness:

• \f matches form-feed.
• \r matches carriage return.
• \n matches linefeed.
• \t matches horizontal tab.
• \v matches vertical tab.
• \0 matches NUL character.
• [\b] matches backspace.
• \s matches whitespace (short for [\f\n\r\t\v\u00A0\u2028\u2029]).
• \S matches anything but a whitespace (short for [^\f\n\r\t\v\u00A0\u2028\u2029]).
• \w matches any alphanumerical character (word characters) including underscore (short for [a-zA-Z0-9_]).
• \W matches any non-word characters (short for [^a-zA-Z0-9_]).
• \d matches any digit (short for [0-9]).
• \D matches any non-digit (short for [^0-9]).
• \b matches a word boundary (the position between a word and a space).
• \B matches a non-word boundary (short for [^\b]).
• \cX matches a control character. E.g: \cm matches control-M.
• \xhh matches the character with two characters of hexadecimal code hh.
• \uhhhh matches the Unicode character with four characters of hexadecimal code hhhh.