Wicked Cool Perl Scripts

#38 EOL Type Detector

One of the problems with standards is that there are so many of them. Evensomething as simple as the format of a text file can be subject to many different standards. For example, Microsoft, Apple, and Unix/Linux all use a different end-of-line (EOL) indicator.

The root of this problem can be traced back to the early days, in the 1920s B.C. (before computers). A device called a Teletype was invented to send text over the phone lines at the amazingly fast speed of 10 characters a second (fast for 1920s technology).

The unit consisted of a keyboard, printer, paper tape reader, and punch. It contained a character encoder made out of levers and a character decoder built around a shift register that looked a lot like a car's ...