Kate can't show some newline characters using escape sequences

Question

Kate and KWrite both don't show all \n characters. Problems appear to be next to where there are empty lines.

The problem isn't just in the highlighting itself. Wrong number of matches are found. Search and replace doesn't replace all \n characters.

Searching for \r doesn't find anything. If I place the cursor at the beginning of, say, line 7 and press delete and then enter, the search works.

Is it possible that other characters, besides \n and \r are used for newlines? The file was created as UTF-8 and only opened with Kate as UTF-8.

I understand that posting a picture of text is discouraged, but I can't show the highlighting without the screenshot.

This is of utmost importance to me, because I use Kate's search and replace feature to quickly format big documents, e.g. for StackExchange.

I run up-to-date Fedora 24 with KDE.

Kate version 16.04.3.

Using:

KDE Frameworks 5.24.0

Qt 5.6.1 (built against 5.6.1)

The xcb windowing system

Update I think I found a way to reproduce the bug.

• Open the file. It has to have empty lines in order to work.
• Search for \n. It should work correctly.
• Replace \n with \na. Other replacements work as well.
• Search for \n. It should still work correctly.
• Undo the change (CTRL + z).
• Search for \n. It should work incorrectly now, skipping newlines that are before or after an empty line.
• Reload the file (F5). It should work correctly.

If I save the file on step 5 (the undo), the bug still works. Examining the file with xxd after the save on step 5 and after step 7 (the reload) gives identical outputs. So I guess Kate doesn't change the file or its encoding in any step, but somehow manages to screw up the search.