Remove all line breaks from a long string of text

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 and delete all line breaks to make it a single line of text. My method for acquiring the string is very simple.

string = raw_input("Please enter string: ") 

Is there a different way I should be grabbing the string from the user? I'm running Python 2.7.4 on a Mac.

P.S. Clearly I'm a noob, so even if a solution isn't the most efficient, the one that uses the most simple syntax would be appreciated.

11 Answers

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.

You can try using string replace:

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

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' 

The canonic answer, in Python, would be :

s = ''.join(s.splitlines()) 

It splits the string into lines (letting Python doing it according to its own best practices). Then you merge it. Two possibilities here:

• replace the newline by a whitespace (' '.join())
• or without a whitespace (''.join())

updated based on Xbello comment:

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

read more here

Another option is regex:

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

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

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

A method taking into consideration

• additional white characters at the beginning/end of string
• additional white characters at the beginning/end of every line
• various end-line characters

it takes such a multi-line string which may be messy e.g.

test_str = '\nhej ho \n aaa\r\n a\n ' 

and produces nice one-line string

>>> ' '.join([line.strip() for line in test_str.strip().splitlines()]) 'hej ho aaa a' 

UPDATE: To fix multiple new-line character producing redundant spaces:

' '.join([line.strip() for line in test_str.strip().splitlines() if line.strip()]) 

This works for the following too test_str = '\nhej ho \n aaa\r\n\n\n\n\n a\n '

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.

Regular expressions is the fastest way to do this

s='''some kind of string with a bunch\r of extra spaces in it''' re.sub(r'\s(?=\s)','',re.sub(r'\s',' ',s)) 

result:

'some kind of string with a bunch of extra spaces in it' 

You can use

string= string.replace("\n", str()) 

However, sometimes it says

NoneType object has no attribute 'replace' 

Thus, you shall be careful doing it. But thanks for asking about this

raw_ input !