How do I remove newlines from a text file?
LinuxBashScriptingShellSedLinux Problem Overview
I have the following data, and I need to put it all into one line.
I have this:
22791
;
14336
;
22821
;
34653
;
21491
;
25522
;
33238
;
I need this:
22791;14336;22821;34653;21491;25522;33238;
EDIT
None of these commands is working perfectly.
Most of them let the data look like this:
22791
;14336
;22821
;34653
;21491
;25522
Linux Solutions
Solution 1 - Linux
tr --delete '\n' < yourfile.txt
tr -d '\n' < yourfile.txt
Edit:
If none of the commands posted here are working, then you have something other than a newline separating your fields. Possibly you have DOS/Windows line endings in the file (although I would expect the Perl solutions to work even in that case)?
Try:
tr -d "\n\r" < yourfile.txt
If that doesn't work then you're going to have to inspect your file more closely (e.g. in a hex editor) to find out what characters are actually in there that you want to remove.
Solution 2 - Linux
perl -p -i -e 's/\R//g;' filename
Must do the job.
Solution 3 - Linux
tr -d '\n' < file.txt
Or
awk '{ printf "%s", $0 }' file.txt
Or
sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g' file.txt
This page here has a bunch of other methods to remove newlines.
edited to remove feline abuse :)
Solution 4 - Linux
paste -sd "" file.txt
Solution 5 - Linux
Expanding on a previous answer, this removes all new lines and saves the result to a new file (thanks to @tripleee):
tr -d '\n' < yourfile.txt > yourfile2.txt
Which is better than a "useless cat" (see comments):
cat file.txt | tr -d '\n' > file2.txt
Also useful for getting rid of new lines at the end of the file, e.g. created by using echo blah > file.txt
.
Note that the destination filename is different, important, otherwise you'll wipe out the original content!
Solution 6 - Linux
You can edit the file in vim:
$ vim inputfile
:%s/\n//g
Solution 7 - Linux
use
head -n 1 filename | od -c
to figure WHAT is the offending character. then use
tr -d '\n' <filename
for LF
tr -d '\r\n' <filename
for CRLF
Solution 8 - Linux
POSIX classes
Use sed withThis will remove all lines containing only whitespace (spaces & tabs)
sed '/^[[:space:]]*$/d'
Just take whatever you are working with and pipe it to that
Example
cat filename | sed '/^[[:space:]]*$/d'
Solution 9 - Linux
Using man 1 ed:
# cf. http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/doku.php?id=howto:edit-ed
ed -s file <<< $'1,$j\n,p' # print to stdout
ed -s file <<< $'1,$j\nwq' # in-place edit
Solution 10 - Linux
Was having the same case today, super easy in vim or nvim, you can use gJ
to join lines. For your use case, just do
99gJ
this will join all your 99 lines. You can adjust the number 99
as need according to how many lines to join. If just join 1 line, then only gJ
is good enough.
Solution 11 - Linux
$ perl -0777 -pe 's/\n+//g' input >output
$ perl -0777 -pe 'tr/\n//d' input >output
Solution 12 - Linux
If the data is in file.txt, then:
echo $(<file.txt) | tr -d ' '
The '$(<file.txt)
' reads the file and gives the contents as a series of words which 'echo' then echoes with a space between them. The 'tr' command then deletes any spaces:
22791;14336;22821;34653;21491;25522;33238;
Solution 13 - Linux
xargs
consumes newlines as well (but adds a final trailing newline):
xargs < file.txt | tr -d ' '
Solution 14 - Linux
Assuming you only want to keep the digits and the semicolons, the following should do the trick assuming there are no major encoding issues, though it will also remove the very last "newline":
$ tr -cd ";0-9"
You can easily modify the above to include other characters, e.g. if you want to retain decimal points, commas, etc.
Solution 15 - Linux
Nerd fact: use ASCII instead.
tr -d '\012' < filename.extension
(Edited cause i didn't see the friggin' answer that had same solution, only difference was that mine had ASCII)
Solution 16 - Linux
Using the gedit text editor (3.18.3)
- Click Search
- Click Find and Replace...
- Enter
\n\s
into Find field - Leave Replace with blank (nothing)
- Check Regular expression box
- Click the Find button
Note: this doesn't exactly address the OP's original, 7 year old problem but should help some noob linux users (like me) who find their way here from the SE's with similar "how do I get my text all on one line" questions.
Solution 17 - Linux
I would do it with awk, e.g.
awk '/[0-9]+/ { a = a $0 ";" } END { print a }' file.txt
(a disadvantage is that a is "accumulated" in memory).
EDIT
Forgot about printf! So also
awk '/[0-9]+/ { printf "%s;", $0 }' file.txt
or likely better, what it was already given in the other ans using awk.
Solution 18 - Linux
I usually get this usecase when I'm copying a code snippet from a file and I want to paste it into a console without adding unnecessary new lines, I ended up doing a bash alias
( i called it oneline
if you are curious )
xsel -b -o | tr -d '\n' | tr -s ' ' | xsel -b -i
-
xsel -b -o
reads my clipboard -
tr -d '\n'
removes new lines -
tr -s ' '
removes recurring spaces -
xsel -b -i
pushes this back to my clipboard
after that I would paste the new contents of the clipboard into oneline in a console or whatever.
Solution 19 - Linux
You are missing the most obvious and fast answer especially when you need to do this in GUI in order to fix some weird word-wrap.
-
Open
gedit
-
Then Ctrl + H, then put in the
Find
textbox\n
and inReplace with
an empty spaceRegular expression
and voila.
Solution 20 - Linux
To also remove the trailing newline at the end of the file
python -c "s=open('filename','r').read();open('filename', 'w').write(s.replace('\n',''))"