[rfc-i] Line ending conventions in drafts and RFCs

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 15/10/2012 02:42, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> Probably this question has come up before:
> What's the line ending convention for drafts and RFCs, if there's any?
> 
> The IETF convention, in particular for mail, is CRLF. On the other hand,
> and RFC I just checked (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt) was
> just LF.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-editor/instructions2authors.txt says

                Note: A plain-text RFC is expected to be stored on a
                disk file using the EOL sequence of that system.  For
                example, MS DOS-based systems use the two-character
                sequence: CR LF (Carriage Return followed by Line Feed),
                Unix systems use the single character LF for EOL, and
                EBCDIC systems use the single character NL (New Line).

                Whenever an RFC is transmitted across the Internet,
                Internet protocol convention requires that each line of
                text be followed by the two-character EOL sequence CR LF
                (Carriage Return followed by Line Feed).  A user level
                protocol (e.g., FTP, Telnet, HTTP, SMTP, ...) must make
                the appropriate EOL transformation at each line end.
                Note that binary transmission of plain-text RFC files
                can cause the sender's EOL convention to "leak" into the
                receiver, causing confusion.

   Brian