A block that lost its line breaks

Files and text

Text whose meaning lived in where the lines ended, after it passed through a field that joined the lines together.

The shape

This card documents damage rather than a format, so the shape being described is the shape of the wound. Certain kinds of text carry information in their line endings: an armoured block needs its header line separate from its body, a list needs one item per line, a table needs its rows apart. Join those lines and the characters all survive while the structure does not.

The damage is silent. Nothing is reported, nothing is marked, and the result is still valid text. What you are left with is a run of characters that reads as prose and used to be a structure.

What is lost

the distinction between one long line and several short ones

What survives

every character except the line ending itself, and sometimes a space in its place

Primary tell

two structural markers appearing on a single line where each should have had its own

Blank lines

usually the first casualty, since a joiner treats an empty line as nothing to keep

Left behind

a trailing space where a break used to be, or two spaces where a break met an indent

Soft wrap

drawn by the viewer to fit the width; no character exists at the turn

Hard break

a character in the text; it stays where it is at any width

intact: each line ends where it means to

-----BEGIN EXAMPLE BLOCK-----
Version: example

[body: 24 lines of base64 characters, removed here]
-----END EXAMPLE BLOCK-----

joined: the tell is two marker runs on one line

-----BEGIN EXAMPLE BLOCK----- Version: example [body...]
-----END EXAMPLE BLOCK-----

two runs of five hyphens now share a line, and the
blank line that separated header from body is gone

Soft wrap and hard break

A viewer that reaches the right hand edge of its column has to do something, and what it does is draw the rest of the line underneath. No character is added. Narrow the window and the turn moves; widen it and the turn disappears. That is soft wrapping, and it is a property of the display.

A hard break is different in kind. It is a character sitting in the text, and it stays exactly where it is whatever the width of the window. Two lines separated by a hard break are two lines everywhere they are ever shown.

On screen these are drawn identically. A line that turns at the right edge gives no visual indication of which mechanism produced the turn, and there is no mark, colour or spacing difference to read. That is the uncomfortable fact at the centre of this card: what you see wrapped in front of you may be one line or twenty, and looking harder will not settle it.

One thing does distinguish them without any tool: changing the width. Resize the window, or rotate a phone, and soft wraps move while hard breaks hold. Where that is available it is the only genuine by eye test, and where it is not, the structure has to be inferred from the tells below.

Shapes that break when the lines go

• An armoured block whose blank line vanished. The empty line between the header area and the body is structural. Once it is gone the block may still show both marker lines and still be unusable. See the public key block card for what the intact shape looks like.
• A base64 body run into one line. Body content is normally broken at a fixed width. Joined, it becomes a single enormous line, which is legal in some readers and rejected by others, and which is impossible to proofread by eye at any length.
• A list turned into a paragraph. Items that were one per line become a sentence with no separators. Numbers and bullets end up mid line, which is the tell, because a digit followed by a full stop rarely sits in the middle of ordinary prose.
• A table flattened into a row. Column boundaries were spaces and row boundaries were breaks, so removing the breaks leaves every value present and every relationship gone.
• A quoted block whose markers merged. Marked lines joined together put markers inside sentences instead of at line starts, described further on the quoted message card.

How to check it by eye

What a wrong shape means

Almost always it means a field. Single line inputs, search boxes, chat composers, form fields with a fixed height, spreadsheet cells and page titles all accept pasted multi line text and quietly return it as one line. The text was structured when it went in and unstructured when it came out, and the field reported nothing because from its point of view nothing went wrong.

Message clients contribute their own variety of the same damage by rewrapping to a preferred width, which does not join everything but does move breaks to new places. Rendering engines contribute another, by collapsing runs of whitespace when text is displayed as a paragraph rather than as preformatted content.

Read a flattened block as a routing accident. It says something about the sequence of fields the text passed through and nothing about the person who sent it, since senders rarely know which link in the chain reformats.

The harder consequence is that the damage is not reversible from the damaged copy. Once breaks are gone the original positions are not recorded anywhere in what you are holding, and putting them back is reconstruction from guesswork. For text where the break positions were structural, the honest move is to obtain the block again by a route that preserves lines rather than to repair it by hand.

What a correct shape does not prove

A block that arrives with its lines intact has demonstrated one thing: that the path it took did not join lines. That is a property of the path. It attaches to the text only by accident of travel.

• Intact structure says nothing about content. Correctly broken lines can hold anything at all.
• A blank line in the right position does not indicate that the body between the markers is complete, or that any of it is what it claims.
• A stated line count inside a marker line is a number somebody wrote, and it is not compared against anything by the act of reading it.
• A block that survived intact may have been reassembled by hand at some earlier point, and reassembly leaves no trace in the shape.
• Line width tells you which tool last wrapped the text, not which person wrote it.
• The presence of an armour envelope is a formatting fact; what the envelope carries is a separate question with its own card.

The trailing checksum line that some armoured blocks carry is often mistaken for a general integrity guarantee. Its actual scope is narrow, and it is set out on the armour checksum card.

What this card is not

What an armoured block means, what belongs inside one and which envelope is which are on the public key block card and its siblings. Quote markers and nesting depth are on the quoted message card. This card stays with the damage itself: how to notice it, what causes it, and how little of it can be undone by looking.

Questions people send about this shape

Can I put the line breaks back by hand?

Sometimes, and never with certainty. Where the structure is highly regular, such as a body broken at a fixed width, the original positions can be reconstructed by counting. Where the text was prose, a list or a table, the break positions were meaningful and are simply absent from the joined copy. Obtaining the block again through a route that preserves lines is more reliable than any repair.

Why do some fields join lines without warning?

A single line input has one value, so multi line text has to become one line to fit. The field is not discarding anything it considers important; from its side, a line ending is a character it cannot store and therefore replaces or drops. The absence of a warning is a design choice made long before your text arrived.

Does a wrapped line on screen mean the text contains a break?

No, and there is no way to settle it by looking. Wrapping is drawn by the viewer to fit the available width, and a break is a character in the text; both produce the same picture. Changing the width of the window separates them, because wrapping moves and breaks do not.