A bug maybe?

I have a custom perl script that is called by clientlaunch that runs some tests. I am calling the xymon via system and passing the arguments for the alert. As an example:

system("/home/xymon/client/bin/xymon 127.0.0.1 \"status+1h myhost.mycolumn yellow My stauts message\"");

When the command runs, everything seems fine. Until I drill down into the history. When I go into the "Historical Status" screen for an alert, the status message is crammed in with the "unchanged in" line on the page. It looks like:

My status messageStatus unchanged in 0.00 minutes

Status message recived from 1.1.1.1 Client data available

It doesn't happen on the main alert pages, only in the Historical Status pages.

What I did to fix it, was to put a newline character at the end of all of my messages: system("/home/xymon/client/bin/xymon 127.0.0.1 \"status+1h myhost.mycolumn yellow My stauts message\n\"");

The newline corrects the formatting on the alert message and it displays property, however, I'm not sure this should be like this. Is the newline character supposed to be necessary?