Replace Line Breaks in a String C#

Question

How can I replace Line Breaks within a string in C#?

Answer 1

I needed to replace the \r\n with an actual carriage return and line feed and replace \t with an actual tab. So I came up with the following:

public string Transform(string data)
{
    string result = data;
    char cr = (char)13;
    char lf = (char)10;
    char tab = (char)9;

    result = result.Replace("\\r", cr.ToString());
    result = result.Replace("\\n", lf.ToString());
    result = result.Replace("\\t", tab.ToString());

    return result;
}

Answer 2

Best way to replace linebreaks safely is

yourString.Replace("\r\n","\n") //handling windows linebreaks
.Replace("\r","\n")             //handling mac linebreaks

that should produce a string with only \n (eg linefeed) as linebreaks. this code is usefull to fix mixed linebreaks too.

Answer 3

I would use Environment.Newline when I wanted to insert a newline for a string, but not to remove all newlines from a string.

Depending on your platform you can have different types of newlines, but even inside the same platform often different types of newlines are used. In particular when dealing with file formats and protocols.

string ReplaceNewlines(string blockOfText, string replaceWith)
{
    return blockOfText.Replace("\r\n", replaceWith).Replace("\n", replaceWith).Replace("\r", replaceWith);
}

Answer 4

var answer = Regex.Replace(value, "(\n|\r)+", replacementString);

Answer 5

If you want to replace only the newlines:

var input = @"sdfhlu \r\n sdkuidfs\r\ndfgdgfd";
var match = @"[\\ ]+";
var replaceWith = " ";
Console.WriteLine("input: " + input);
var x = Regex.Replace(input.Replace(@"\n", replaceWith).Replace(@"\r", replaceWith), match, replaceWith);
Console.WriteLine("output: " + x);

If you want to replace newlines, tabs and white spaces:

var input = @"sdfhlusdkuidfs\r\ndfgdgfd";
var match = @"[\\s]+";
var replaceWith = "";
Console.WriteLine("input: " + input);
var x = Regex.Replace(input, match, replaceWith);
Console.WriteLine("output: " + x);

Answer 6

Another option is to create a StringReader over the string in question. On the reader, do .ReadLine() in a loop. Then you have the lines separated, no matter what (consistent or inconsistent) separators they had. With that, you can proceed as you wish; one possibility is to use a StringBuilder and call .AppendLine on it.

The advantage is, you let the framework decide what constitutes a "line break".