Carriage return

A carriage return, sometimes known as a cartridge return and often shortened to CR, <CR> or return, is a control character or mechanism used to reset a device's position to the beginning of a line of text. It is closely associated with the line feed and newline concepts, although it can be considered separately in its own right.

Originally, the term "carriage return" referred to a mechanism or lever on a typewriter. It was used after typing a line of text and caused the assembly holding the paper (the carriage) to return to the left so that the machine was ready to type again on the left-hand side of the paper. The lever would also usually advance the paper to the next line.

The first power carriage return was added to electric typewriters by Smith Corona in 1960. The command key for this was usually labeled "carriage return" or "return". With typewriters like the Selectric, where the type element was moved when typing and the paper held stationary, the key returned the type element to the left and the term "carrier return" was sometimes used for this function.

To improve the keyboard for non-English-speakers, the symbol ↵ (U+21B5, HTML entity ↵) was introduced to mark this key, since this graphic could communicate the action of the key without using words.

In computing, the carriage return is one of the control characters in ASCII code, Unicode, EBCDIC, and many other codes. It commands a printer, or other output system such as the display of a system console, to move the position of the cursor to the first position on the same line. It was mostly used along with line feed (LF), a move to the next line, so that together they start a new line. Together, this sequence can be referred to as CRLF.

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