Remove line breaks in Bourne Shell from variable

Question

In bourne shell I have the following:

VALUES=`some command that returns multiple line values`

echo $VALUES

Looks like:

\"ONE\"         


        

Answer 1

Another option is using xargs (which keeps a final newline though - instead of a possible trailing space using tr):

echo $VALUES | xargs
printf '%s\n' 1 2 3 4 5 | xargs

@yozloy: how to pass escaped string using <<<

tr -d '\n' <<< "`printf '%b' 'a line with line feed \n'`"