How to enter newline character in Oracle?
Chr(Number) should work for you.
select 'Hello' || chr(10) ||' world' from dual
Remember different platforms expect different new line characters:
- CHR(10) => LF, line feed (unix)
- CHR(13) => CR, carriage return (windows, together with LF)
According to the Oracle PLSQL language definition, a character literal can contain "any printable character in the character set". https://docs.oracle.com/cd/A97630_01/appdev.920/a96624/02_funds.htm#2876
@Robert Love's answer exhibits a best practice for readable code, but you can also just type in the linefeed character into the code. Here is an example from a Linux terminal using sqlplus
:
SQL> set serveroutput on
SQL> begin
2 dbms_output.put_line( 'hello' || chr(10) || 'world' );
3 end;
4 /
hello
world
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL> begin
2 dbms_output.put_line( 'hello
3 world' );
4 end;
5 /
hello
world
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
Instead of the CHR( NN ) function you can also use Unicode literal escape sequences like u'\0085'
which I prefer because, well you know we are not living in 1970 anymore. See the equivalent example below:
SQL> begin
2 dbms_output.put_line( 'hello' || u'\000A' || 'world' );
3 end;
4 /
hello
world
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
For fair coverage I guess it is worth noting that different operating systems use different characters/character sequences for end of line handling. You've got to have a think about the context in which your program output is going to be viewed or printed, in order to determine whether you are using the right technique.
- Microsoft Windows: CR/LF or
u'\000D\000A'
- Unix (including Apple MacOS): LF or
u'\000A'
- IBM OS390: NEL or
u'\0085'
- HTML:
'<BR>'
- XHTML:
'<br />'
- etc. etc.