U000A

U+000A, commonly written as LINE FEED or LF, is a Unicode code point with the hexadecimal value 0A and the decimal value 10. It is a control character in the C0 control set and is not a printable symbol. Its primary function is to indicate a line break in text processing.

Historically rooted in ASCII, LINE FEED denotes a move to the next line. In Unix and Unix-like systems, LF is used as the standard newline character. Windows systems typically employ a pair consisting of Carriage Return (U+000D) followed by Line Feed (U+000A), while classic Mac systems used CR alone. Modern software often normalizes diverse line-ending conventions to a single LF or to CRLF depending on context.

In Unicode and modern text processing, U+000A is encoded in UTF-8 as the single byte 0x0A, in UTF-16 as 0x000A, and in UTF-32 as 0x0000000A. The character is generally invisible in rendered text, as it serves to separate lines rather than to display a glyph.

Beyond simple line breaks, the handling of newline characters can affect programming languages, compilers, and data formats. Some languages treat the newline as a statement terminator, others ignore it as whitespace, and various file formats specify exact newline expectations (for example, many network protocols require CRLF endings in textual data).