Why does \r (carriage return) also create a new line when printing to the Command Window?

There does not seem to be a difference in the use of \n or \r. I would like to see the \r only return a carriage return and not a new line as it does in C.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This is a problem when using FPRINTF to print to the screen. FPRINTF will work as expected when writing to a file.

In MATLAB 6.1 (R12.1) it is possible to get the effect you are looking for by using '\b' instead of '\r', where '\b' is the escape character for a single character backspace.

You will need to change the code a little to adjust to the '\b'. Following is an illustrative example:

 ix = 1;
 chars='|/-\';
 fprintf(1,'%c', chars(ix));         % new line
 while(1)
   fprintf(1,'\b%c', chars(ix));     % modified line
   ix = mod(ix,4)+1;
   pause(0.05);
 end

If multiple spaces need to be deleted, you may use the following code fragment:

for ix=1:numspaces
  fprintf('\b')
end