Line breaks under Unix and Windows

The difference in the treatment of line breaks between Unix and Windows is a well-known problem. While Unix uses a single LineFeed character ('\n', hex 0x0A) as line separator, Windows uses the combination CarriageReturn/LineFeed ('\r\n', hex 0x0D0A). Java automatically converts text as needed which generally works well.

However, the XML standard specifies that an XML parser has to convert line breaks of any type into LineFeed only, regardless of the system under which it is running. This could lead to trouble, for example when checking a multi line text field. QF-Test works around the problem by converting all text strings read from the SUT to the Unix version with LineFeed only. This has the added benefit that tests created on one system will run unchanged on the other.