Creating a new line character

Hey, I am using Nodebox for a while now and while the documentation is sparse this forum has been a valuable source for a deeper understanding and tipps and tricks.
I think I can contribute on trick that I have not read about in the other posts yet.

Problem:
I wanted to import a CSV file from an online source. So I could not rely on the CSV import node, but had to parse the server response into a table on my own.
For that I needed to split the string by line breaks at some point. But none of the string related nodes let's you input a line break anywhere.
So I ended up writing a little custom node that let's you specify a character by ASCII/unicode number.

I also read about John's approach of importing the file, looking for any new-line character present, isolating that character and then using that one going forward.

Solution:
Recently I stumbled across a nice way by accident:
The format number node is using a specific syntax (Python, Java, Jython?). While reading up on that I noticed that the syntax also allows you to specify a new line character. For example to format a date and time into two separate lines:

2025-Jan-01
1:30PM

So if you just specify the format of the number to be %n, the format number node will output a single new line character that you can use to split a long text by lines or to insert a line break into a single string.

P.S.: I wanted to attach an example, but the previous attempt to post this did not go through. So I'm trying again without.

Here is a little example network.

Tolifox,

This is WAY COOL! Nice work!

The format_number node is perhaps the least documented of all the undocumented nodes in Nodebox. Here is an exchange I had with Frederik about it in 2015 that includes some useful links:

https://forum.nodebox.net/t/14806591/the-format-number-template

As Frederik explained, format_number is a crippled form of Java's string.format function. Much of the Java functionality is unavailable, and what bits and pieces remain are shrouded in mystery. Over the years I have found a few useful tricks it can do.

But I hadn't spotted this one! And it's quite handy. Many is the time I tried to get by with textpath's width parameter to add line breaks, but those often did not land quite where I wanted them.

Would you mind if I turned this hack into a simple node and added that node to my library? I think it would be a very handy addition.

I have attached a demo of your hack in node form.

I call it "line_break". It's dirt simple. Choose a character, any character that does not occur in your text, to serve as your line break character. The default is a backslash. Then enter your text using that break character wherever you want a line break. The node returns a single string with that character replaced by %n characters.

You can then treat the output as you would any other string, like feeding it into a textpath node to be rendered in a given font.

If you look inside the extremely simple line_break node you will see that the format_number node has a comment giving you credit for discovering the hack.

If you have any objections to including this node in my library let me know. Otherwise I will include it in version 3.6.

Thanks for a great contribution!

John

Hey John,

sure, feel free to include it. I'm happy to have found something that might be useful for others here. Thanks for the credit in the comment. :)

I think I might tidy up my GoogleSheets node a bit and drop it here as well.

UPDATE!

I have modified my charpath, kern, and text_svg nodes to accept strings with line breaks and to allow control over vertical leading! Details here:

https://forum.nodebox.net/t/7523653542/line-breaks-added-to-charpath-kern-and-text-svg