As I said about *echo* way back in my first response: the *print* command
is what is turning the backslash-n sequences into newlines. If you use *-r* to
turn off that behavior, you can see the strings unmangled:

% print -r $ggg

 abc\n \n def\n \n ghi\n


The -r is telling print not to do something it normally does. The result is
the raw string (which I think is what *-r* stands for).

To restate: if your goal is to print out a newline, you have options. If
you do this:

print $'\n'

Then you are creating in the shell's memory a string containing a literal
newline character (one byte with value 10), which the shell then passes to
*print*, which just echoes it verbatim, doing no translation on it
whatsoever.  Job done. The translation from \n to newline was done by the
shell before *print* ever ran.

If you instead do this:

print '\n'

Then the string you create and pass to *print* has no newline in it. It is
not one byte of value 10, but two bytes, one with value 92 (backslash) and
the second with value 110 (lowercase *n*).  The code implementing the
*print* command recognizes this sequence as code for "print a newline", so
it does. But that's the command doing that. The string itself has no
newline in it.



Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>


On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 10:53 Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:

>
>
> On 2024-04-14 07:15, Roman Perepelitsa wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 4:06 PM Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>
> wrote:
> >> % ggg=( 'abc\n' '\n' 'def\n' '\n' 'ghi\n' )
> > There are no newlines in there.
> % ggg=( ' abc\n' '\n' 'def\n' '\n' 'ghi\n' )
>
> % print $ggg
>   abc
>
>   def
>
>   ghi
>
>
> % typeset -p ggg
> typeset -a ggg=( ' abc\n' '\n' 'def\n' '\n' 'ghi\n' )
>
>
>
>