I don't know what the normal behaviour is. I was expecting the remaining of
the line to be wiped out, but you must be right: the character 'c' is
already printed, the cursor moves back one position and go to the next
line, leaving the 'c' in place.
But what about this one:

> cat("abc\b\b\b")
> c

Here, I end up with the cursor being on the 'c', i.e. if I type something
it erase the 'c'.
It is strange that the 'c' appears _after_ the console prompt, isn't it?

Renaud




On 1 November 2013 13:41, Sean O'Riordain <seanpor@acm.org> wrote:

> Hi Renaud,
>
> Are you sure it's not applied? is \b a backspace i.e. just move the
> cursor back one space, or is it a delete the character to the left of
> the cursor?
>
> Kind regards,
> Sean
>
>
> On 1 November 2013 11:06, Renaud Gaujoux <renaud@mancala.cbio.uct.ac.za>
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > when mixing newline and backspace characters I get the following output
> > (see below). In the second call, the backspace character is simply not
> > applied. Is this normal behaviour?
> > Thank you.
> >
> >> cat("abc\b")
> > ab> cat("abc\b\n")
> > abc
> >>
> >
> >         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
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> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

