Hard return

Alternatively called a paragraph break, a hard return is an ending of a line that begins the next line or paragraph. The picture shows what a hard return looks like with formatting marks enabled. Hard returns are represented with a pilcrow, which resembles a backwards P. The two lines above the ending line with a hard return have soft returns.

How to make a hard return?

To make a hard return press Enter on the keyboard.

How to remove hard returns with a regular expression?

Below is an example of how returns could be replaced in example text using the Perl programming language.

use strict;
my $example = "Example of text
with multiple
returns";
$example =~ s/\n/ /g;
print "Example text: '$example'";

In the above code the "$example =~ s/\n/ /g;" line is a regular expression that replaces the new lines (\n) with a space.

Page break, Paragraph, Return, Soft return, Word processor terms