Replace “OS agnostic” newlines

Question

I have several different document formats coming in. I'd like to strip out all the newlines and replace them with a " " . How can I account for newlines other than "\\n" ?

Something like s.gsub("\\n", " ")

Answer 1

Most operating systems use \\n or \\r (or a combination) for newlines.

s.gsub(/[\\n\\r]+/, " ") should do the trick.

/[\\n\\r]+/ is known as a regular expression. It matches \\n , \\r and any combination of the two.

Answer 2

To make it your code more readable you could however use my gem .

You can install it this way:

gem install linebreak

You can use it this way:

require 'aef/linebreak/string_extension'

"Something\n".linebreak_encode(" ")
# => "Something "

Other examples:

"Something\n".linebreak_encode(:windows)
# => "Something\r\n"

"Something\r\n".linebreak_encode(:unix)
# => "Something\n"

It additionally comes with a commandline tool. Documentation can be found here .