"std::endl" vs "\n"

Question

Many C++ books contain example code like this...

std::cout << "Test line" << std::endl;

...so I've always done that too. But I've seen a lot of code from working developers like this instead:

std::cout << "Test line\n";

Is there a technical reason to prefer one over the other, or is it just a matter of coding style?

• Payton Millhouse: Good explanation: cppkid.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/why-i-prefer-n-to-stdendl
• Kira: @derobert this one is older than the other
• derobert: @HediNaily indeed it is. But the answer on the other one strikes me as slightly better, so I picked to do it that way around. Also, the other one is slightly broader, also covering '\n'.
• John Damm Sørensen: If you intend to run your program on anything else than your own laptop, never ever use the endl statement. Especially if you are writing a lot of short lines or as I have often seen single characters to a file. The use of endl is know to kill networked file systems like NFS.
• qwr: stackoverflow.com/a/30968225/3163618 there may be a significant performance difference.

Answer 1

The varying line-ending characters don't matter, assuming the file is open in text mode, which is what you get unless you ask for binary. The compiled program will write out the correct thing for the system compiled for.

The only difference is that std::endl flushes the output buffer, and '\n' doesn't. If you don't want the buffer flushed frequently, use '\n'. If you do (for example, if you want to get all the output, and the program is unstable), use std::endl.

• Omnifarious: Or consider using ::std::cerr instead of ::std::cout since it's unbuffered and flushed with each and every output operation.
• Loki Astari: @Omnifarious: No std::cerr should be reserved for errors. The two streams are not synced together so if you output some text to cout it may be buffered and the cerr will go direct to the output this resulting in a mixed mode display. Use cerr for what it is supposed to be for (errors) and cout for what it is designed for (normal interaction).
• Lara Bailey: @Lucas: No more than '\n' is platform aware.
• Kerrek SB: @LokiAstari: I wouldn't say stderr is for "errors". Rather, it's for out-of-band diagnostic messages, if you will. It should be possible to say ./prog > file and store only the true program payload, but the program may like to output a lot more status information, even in normal interaction.
• GuLearn: "In many implementations, standard output is line-buffered, and writing '\n' causes a flush anyway, unless std::cout.sync_with_stdio(false) was executed." copied from here

Answer 2

The difference can be illustrated by the following:

std::cout << std::endl;

is equivalent to

std::cout << '\n' << std::flush;

So,

• Use std::endl If you want to force an immediate flush to the output.
• Use \n if you are worried about performance (which is probably not the case if you are using the << operator).

I use \n on most lines.
Then use std::endl at the end of a paragraph (but that is just a habit and not usually necessary).

Contrary to other claims, the \n character is mapped to (or from) the correct platform end of line sequence only if the stream is a file stream in text mode, including std::cout (and std::cin). The translation does not happen for binary mode file streams nor for other types of streams, such as a std::stringstream.

• C. K. Young: In many cases, the "see the output immediately" is a red herring, since cout is tied to cin, meaning that if you read input from cin, cout will be flushed first. But if you want to display a progress bar or something without reading from cin, then sure, flushing is useful.
• legends2k: @LokiAstari: if you are using the << operator, you probably aren't worried about performance - why? I didn't know that operator<< isn't performant, or what alternative to use for performance? Please point me to some material to understand this further.
• Loki Astari: @legends2k: There is an old wives tale that C++ streams are not as performant as C printf(). Though true to an extent the main difference in speed is caused by people using C++ streams incorrectly. stackoverflow.com/a/1042121/14065 In C++ remember to unsync iostreams with C-streams sync_with_stdio(false) and don't flush your output continuously. Let the library work out when to do it. stackoverflow.com/a/1926432/14065
• Ben Voigt: @Loki: There's an urban legend that sync_with_stdio makes iostreams as fast as stdio. It does not
• Loki Astari: @BenVoigt: I was careful with my wording above (so I am happy with them). It is not as performant as stdio (because it does more). BUT a lot of the performance gap people complain about is cause by sync with stdio.

Answer 3

There might be performance issues, std::endl forces a flush of the output stream.

• dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten: And it can do any other processing that the local system requires to make this work well.

Answer 4

There's another function call implied in there if you're going to use std::endl

a) std::cout << "Hello\n";
b) std::cout << "Hello" << std::endl;

a) calls operator << once.
b) calls operator << twice.

• smparkes: It may be obvious, but it has a huge impact on threaded programs where, generally, the first version will write a single line in one shot where the second version may be split by writes from other threads. Often enough I find myself writing std::cout << "hello\n" << std::flush to avoid this.
• byxor: What about std::cout << "Hello" << "\n";?
• iBug: @byxor Almost the same except the buffer flushing as described in other answers. Anyway, it's redundant when you can merge the two string literals into one.
• Enlico: Well, if the string to be printed is not a literal, then the calls to the << would be 2 in the case a as well, thus I wouldn't claim the need for one or two << (or two function calls in general) be a difference between \n and endl.
• Carlo Wood: Lol no, that is not the reason I use \n.

Answer 5

I recalled reading about this in the standard, so here goes:

See C11 standard which defines how the standard streams behave, as C++ programs interface the CRT, the C11 standard should govern the flushing policy here.

ISO/IEC 9899:201x

7.21.3 §7

At program startup, three text streams are predefined and need not be opened explicitly — standard input (for reading conventional input), standard output (for writing conventional output), and standard error (for writing diagnostic output). As initially opened, the standard error stream is not fully buffered; the standard input and standard output streams are fully buffered if and only if the stream can be determined not to refer to an interactive device.

7.21.3 §3

When a stream is unbuffered, characters are intended to appear from the source or at the destination as soon as possible. Otherwise characters may be accumulated and transmitted to or from the host environment as a block. When a stream is fully buffered, characters are intended to be transmitted to or from the host environment as a block when a buffer is filled. When a stream is line buffered, characters are intended to be transmitted to or from the host environment as a block when a new-line character is encountered. Furthermore, characters are intended to be transmitted as a block to the host environment when a buffer is filled, when input is requested on an unbuffered stream, or when input is requested on a line buffered stream that requires the transmission of characters from the host environment. Support for these characteristics is implementation-defined, and may be affected via the setbuf and setvbuf functions.

This means that std::cout and std::cin are fully buffered if and only if they are referring to a non-interactive device. In other words, if stdout is attached to a terminal then there is no difference in behavior.

However, if std::cout.sync_with_stdio(false) is called, then '\n' will not cause a flush even to interactive devices. Otherwise '\n' is equivalent to std::endl unless piping to files: c++ ref on std::endl.

Answer 6

They will both write the appropriate end-of-line character(s). In addition to that endl will cause the buffer to be committed. You usually don't want to use endl when doing file I/O because the unnecessary commits can impact performance.

Answer 7

Not a big deal, but endl won't work in boost::lambda.

(cout<<_1<<endl)(3); //error
(cout<<_1<<"\n")(3); //OK , prints 3

Answer 8

If you use Qt and endl, you could accidentally end up using an incorrect endl which gives you very surprising results. See the following code snippet:

#include <iostream>
#include <QtCore/QtCore> 
#include <QtGui/QtGui>
// notice that there is no "using namespace std;"
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
 QApplication qapp(argc,argv);
 QMainWindow mw;
 mw.show();
 std::cout << "Finished Execution!" << endl;
 // This prints something similar to: "Finished Execution!67006AB4"
 return qapp.exec();
}

Note that I wrote endl instead of std::endl (which would have been correct) and apparently there is a endl function defined in qtextstream.h (which is part of QtCore).

Using "\n" instead of endl completely sidesteps any potential namespace issues. This is also a good example why putting symbols into the global namespace (like Qt does by default) is a bad idea.

• Steve Folly: Urgh! Who would ever want to be using namespace std; ?? :-)
• Head Geek: Nasty. Thanks for the comment, I'm sure others will run into that.
• ʇolɐǝz ǝɥʇ qoq: @SteveFolly I do. Why not?
• smerlin: @ʇolɐǝzǝɥʇqoq It is ok as long as you dont do so in header files.
• L. F.: @ʇolɐǝzǝɥʇqoq Please avoid using namespace std;. It is considered bad practice. See Why is "using namespace std;" considered bad practice?

Answer 9

Something that I've never seen anyone say is that '\n' is affected by cout formatting:

#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
int main() {
 std::cout << "\\n:\n" << std::setw(2) << std::setfill('0') << '\n';
 std::cout << "std::endl:\n" << std::setw(2) << std::setfill('0') << std::endl;
}

Output:

\n:
0
std::endl:

Notice, how since '\n' is one character and fill width is set to 2, only 1 zero gets printed before '\n'.

I can't find anything about it anywhere, but it reproduces with clang, gcc and msvc.

I was super confused when I first saw it.

• leoleosuper: This is due to Windows level implementation, where \n is just the line feed character, while endl is both the carriage return (\r) and line feed (\n) for a total of \r\n. Like others pointed out, \n should actually give \r\n if the stream is going to a file.
• TheHardew: @leoleosuper this behaves the same way on linux with cout/ofstream (I have not tested ofstream on windows). Neither endl nor \n produce the carriage return when passed through xxd on linux. Did you reply to a wrong answer? You say "Like others pointed out", but you are the only comment here.
• leoleosuper: I mean other answers/comments on those answers pointed that out. I think I figured it out: putting '\n' goes through cout, and as such, setfill will fill the character before. endl does not go through cout to place the character, instead placing it directly, and then flushing the output. So with your set up, cout << '\n' will modify the input string to "0\n", then use os.put("0\n") in order to put the 0 and newline. endl, on the other hand, goes directly to os.put('\n'), ignoring the setfill.
• Troubadour: @leoleosuper It is not endl that is platform dependent. Formatted output of '\n' is the thing that is platform dependent. On Windows formatted output of '\n' will give the carriage return too. I suspect that on Windows the output will not show a 0. What is interesting is what it would do on Windows if the width is set to 1.
• Christian Halaszovich: @Troubadour On Windows, the output is the same , but the '0' is followed by \r\n.

Answer 10

With reference This is an output-only I/O manipulator.

std::endl Inserts a newline character into the output sequence os and flushes it as if by calling os.put(os.widen('\n')) followed by os.flush().

When to use:

This manipulator may be used to produce a line of output immediately,

e.g.

when displaying output from a long-running process, logging activity of multiple threads or logging activity of a program that may crash unexpectedly.

Also

An explicit flush of std::cout is also necessary before a call to std::system, if the spawned process performs any screen I/O. In most other usual interactive I/O scenarios, std::endl is redundant when used with std::cout because any input from std::cin, output to std::cerr, or program termination forces a call to std::cout.flush(). Use of std::endl in place of '\n', encouraged by some sources, may significantly degrade output performance.

Answer 11

I want to mention this as no one else has mentioned, Using std::endl in a for loop can impact the performance, because it flushes the buffer at each time.

// Using std::endl
 std::cout << "Using std::endl:" << std::endl;
 for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
 std::cout << "Line " << i << std::endl; // Flushing after each line
 }

But if you use '\n' it will be much faster.

// Using '\n'
 std::cout << "Using '\\n':" << std::endl;
 for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
 std::cout << "Line " << i << '\n'; // Not explicitly flushing
 }

• JMCampos: Several answers before have mentioned flushing and the performance hit std::endl brings.
• Hithesh Jay: @JMCampos you're right, but what i mentioned was about when using it in a for loop where we iterate all over again for multiple times, it can affect the performance. So the idea is to never use std::endl when using a loop
• Adrian McCarthy: This is a performance issue when writing to a file, but it's less of an issue when writing to console output. Console output is usually line buffered, in which case there's an implicit flush whenever '\n' is written. In that case, the waste is the overhead of an extra function call, but that function isn't going to do any real work.

Answer 12

From GCC docs:

Some people also believe that sending endl down an output stream only writes a newline. This is incorrect; after a newline is written, the buffer is also flushed. Perhaps this is the effect you want when writing to a screen -- get the text out as soon as possible, etc -- but the buffering is largely wasted when doing this to a file:

output << "a line of text" << endl;
output << some_data_variable << endl;
output << "another line of text" << endl; 

The proper thing to do in this case to just write the data out and let the libraries and the system worry about the buffering. If you need a newline, just write a newline:

output << "a line of text\n"
<< some_data_variable << '\n'
<< "another line of text\n"; 

You can check the docs for ostream, or check endl implementation itself - on my case at usr/include/c++/11/ostream:684 -. There you are going to find:

 // Standard basic_ostream manipulators
 /**
 * @brief Write a newline and flush the stream.
 *
 * This manipulator is often mistakenly used when a simple newline is
 * desired, leading to poor buffering performance. See
 * https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/streambufs.html#io.streambuf.buffering
 * for more on this subject.
 */
 template<typename _CharT, typename _Traits>
 inline basic_ostream<_CharT, _Traits>&
 endl(basic_ostream<_CharT, _Traits>& __os)
 { return flush(__os.put(__os.widen('\n'))); }