I tried to remove all newlines in a pipe like this:
(echo foo; echo bar) | sed -e :a -e N -e '$!ba' -e 's/\n/ /g' | hexdump -C
Which results on debian squeeze in:
00000000 66 6f 6f 20 62 61 72 0a |foo bar.|
00000008
Not removing the trailing newline.
tr -d '\n' as in How do I remove newlines from a text file? works just fine but isn't sed.
you need to replace \n with something else, instead of removing it. and because lines are seperated by \n (at least on GNU/Linux) you need to tell sed to look for some other EOL character using -z, like so:
> echo -e "remove\nnew\nline\ncharacter" | sed -z "s/\n//g"
removenewlinecharacter>
From sed --help
-z, --null-data
separate lines by NUL characters
sed would normally remove entire lines (using /d), like so:
> echo -e "remove\nnew\nline\ncharacter" | sed "/rem\|char/d"
new
line
> echo -e "remove\nnew\nline\ncharacter" | sed -r "/rem|char/d"
new
line
>
using /d every line containing an EOL would be deleted, which are all lines. (one)
> echo -e "remove\nnew\nline\ncharacter" | sed -z "/\n/d"
>
HTH
The answer of Stefan Kaerst is perfect:
(echo foo; echo bar) | sed -z "s/\n//g"
This will export "foobar", as the parameter -z, --null-data separates end of lines by NUL characters (even thought there are no nulls in the text: foobar="66 6f 6f 62 61 72").
An useful example
I use this command to restore paragraphs with broken lines:
cat novel.txt | sed -r 's/^(.{53,80})$/\1<br>/;' | sed -z "s/<br>\n//g"
This joints long lines if they are longer then 53 characters.
A) Find lines longer then 53 characters and add '<br>' at their end.
B) Find '<br>' with newline and remove it.
Thank you, Mr. Kaerst!