How do I remove newlines from a text file?

Question

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

Solution 1

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

perl -p -i -e 's/\R//g;' filename

Must do the job.

Solution 3

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

paste -sd "" file.txt

Solution 5

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!

View more solutions

Comments

[ignis]

Copy-paste into the browser's address bar or another text field. Quick'n'dirty but works for small amounts of data.

[JohnGH]

On Solaris (10) paste -sd "" doesn't work on STDIN by default, so if you're piping to it, use: (some command) | paste -sd "" -

[Jonathan Leffler]

This works as long as the input is not too big and as long as you're using Bash (tagged for Bash, so that's OK). Were I writing the answer now, it would be tr -d '\n' < file.txt, which is what the accepted answer does (and I'm surprised I didn't write it at the time). This was probably just written to show 'yet another way to do it'.

[JobHunter69]

How do you write this output to the same or another file?

[Michal aka Miki]

I think tr is not suitable for empty lines. What do you think? - - I think sed is the best option like described here stackoverflow.com/q/16414410/54964

[josch]

This does not work if you also want to remove the final newline. It only removes intermediate newlines.

[Remi Mélisson]

and to replace with with spaces : :%s/\n/ /g

[BradChesney79]

sed -i '/^[[:space:]]*$/d' filename ...for in place editing; answer as above will output to the screen

[Trenton]

This didn't work on Mac OS, Sundeep's version did. paste -sd'\0' -

[Trenton]

Golfs to perl -pie 's/\R//g' filename

[plugwash]

To route the output to another file just use output redirection. To route it to the same file pipe it to "sponge" (available in the "moreutils" package on Debian base systems).

[admirableadmin]

To write the output to the same file, use a subshell echo -n $(tr -d "\n" < yourfile.txt) > yourfile.txt

[tripleee]

That's a useless cat. Several comment threads here already explain how to redirect the result to a new file.

[Nagev]

Thanks for pointing that out, I just saw a comment with echo -n $(tr -d "\n" < yourfile.txt) > yourfile.txt but hadn't seen it before.

[tripleee]

That's even more convoluted, with the well-known portability issues around echo -n. The simple obvious idiomatic way to do that is tr -d '\n' <file.txt >file2.txt

[baptx]

We need to pay attention to not use the same filename for reading and writing, otherwise the file will be empty.

[David J.]

The tags suggest the OP is looking for a shell-based solution. (FWIW, I personally understand the appeal of Python for these use cases)

[raddevus]

@andpei Thanks very much for that and here is a simple shell script that takes the file name ($1) and does the same work: echo -n $(tr -d "\n" < $1) > $1 Put it in a removeNL.sh file & chmod 777 and run it $ ./removeNL yourfile.txt

[glenn jackman]

No, the -i takes an argument, so it can't be smushed up to -e: perl -i -pe ...