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

;


        

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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',''))"

Answer 3

You can edit the file in vim:

$ vim inputfile
:%s/\n//g

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

paste -sd "" file.txt

Answer 6

Using the gedit text editor (3.18.3)

1. Click Search
2. Click Find and Replace...
3. Enter \n\s into Find field
4. Leave Replace with blank (nothing)
5. Check Regular expression box
6. 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.