Remove all line breaks from a long string of text

Question

Basically, I\'m asking the user to input a string of text into the console, but the string is very long and includes many line breaks. How would I take the user\'s string a

Answer 1

updated based on Xbello comment:

string = my_string.rstrip('\r\n')

read more here

Answer 2

How do you enter line breaks with raw_input? But, once you have a string with some characters in it you want to get rid of, just replace them.

>>> mystr = raw_input('please enter string: ')
please enter string: hello world, how do i enter line breaks?
>>> # pressing enter didn't work...
...
>>> mystr
'hello world, how do i enter line breaks?'
>>> mystr.replace(' ', '')
'helloworld,howdoienterlinebreaks?'
>>>

In the example above, I replaced all spaces. The string '\n' represents newlines. And \r represents carriage returns (if you're on windows, you might be getting these and a second replace will handle them for you!).

basically:

# you probably want to use a space ' ' to replace `\n`
mystring = mystring.replace('\n', ' ').replace('\r', '')

Note also, that it is a bad idea to call your variable string, as this shadows the module string. Another name I'd avoid but would love to use sometimes: file. For the same reason.

Answer 3

You can split the string with no separator arg, which will treat consecutive whitespace as a single separator (including newlines and tabs). Then join using a space:

In : " ".join("\n\nsome    text \r\n with multiple whitespace".split())
Out: 'some text with multiple whitespace'

https://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#str.split

Answer 4

Another option is regex:

>>> import re
>>> re.sub("\n|\r", "", "Foo\n\rbar\n\rbaz\n\r")
'Foobarbaz'

Answer 5

The problem with rstrip is that it does not work in all cases (as I myself have seen few). Instead you can use - text= text.replace("\n"," ") this will remove all new line \n with a space.

Thanks in advance guys for your upvotes.

Answer 6

If anybody decides to use replace, you should try r'\n' instead '\n'

mystring = mystring.replace(r'\n', ' ').replace(r'\r', '')