How to remove new line characters from a string?

Question

I have a string in the following format

string s = "This is a Test String.\n   This is a next line.\t This is a tab.\n'

I want to remove all the occurrences of \n and \r from the string above.

I have tried string s = s.Trim(new char[] {'\n', '\r'}); but it didn't help.

Shortstop

Answer 1

I like to use regular expressions. In this case you could do:

string replacement = Regex.Replace(s, @"\t|\n|\r", "");

Regular expressions aren't as popular in the .NET world as they are in the dynamic languages, but they provide a lot of power to manipulate strings.

Hydrosome

This was definitely the best solution for me. A smooth blend of this C# and javascript was all I needed to resolve my issue. – Andesine

I had a similar problem where I needed also to remove newlines from my string. I tried to do it with string.Replace, didn't work. When I used Regex.Replace with the exact same regular expression string as the parameter, it worked. Thanks. – Eliott

Be careful if using this in a loop that processes 1M+ items. Regex is way slower than just String.Replace – Umbelliferous

The code example also removes tabs \t, which is not in question. – Alysaalyse

Answer 2

You want to use String.Replace to remove a character.

s = s.Replace("\n", String.Empty);
s = s.Replace("\r", String.Empty);
s = s.Replace("\t", String.Empty);

Note that String.Trim(params char[] trimChars) only removes leading and trailing characters in trimChars from the instance invoked on.

You could make an extension method, which avoids the performance problems of the above of making lots of temporary strings:

static string RemoveChars(this string s, params char[] removeChars) {
    Contract.Requires<ArgumentNullException>(s != null);
    Contract.Requires<ArgumentNullException>(removeChars != null);
    var sb = new StringBuilder(s.Length);
    foreach(char c in s) { 
        if(!removeChars.Contains(c)) {
            sb.Append(c);
        }
    }
    return sb.ToString();
}

Edington

Note that this approach will create two intermediate string objects. Depending on the size of your string, this could have significant performance and memory consumption consequences. – Cobaltic

Answer 3

I know this is an old post, however I thought I'd share the method I use to remove new line characters.

s.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "");

References:

MSDN String.Replace Method and MSDN Environment.NewLine Property

Pigsty

nice for Mono support – Umbelliferous

In cross-environment (i.e. Windows app that is feed with data from Unix system) application this will cause more problems than profits. – Gloss

Answer 4

If speed and low memory usage are important, do something like this:

var sb = new StringBuilder(s.Length);

foreach (char i in s)
    if (i != '\n' && i != '\r' && i != '\t')
        sb.Append(i);

s = sb.ToString();

Cobaltic

Yes, i'd go with this too (in an extension method). Always good to use StringBuilder. +1 – Vitia

"Always good to use the StringBuilder" < I'm no pro, but that's not strictly true. This article by Jeff Atwood provides a fun insight into string manipulation/concatenation and ultimately, optimisation. – Ss

Answer 5

just do that

s = s.Replace("\n", String.Empty).Replace("\t", String.Empty).Replace("\r", String.Empty);

Expatriate

Answer 6

A LINQ approach:

string s = "This is a Test String.\n   This is a next line.\t This is a tab.\n'";

string s1 = String.Join("", s.Where(c => c != '\n' && c != '\r' && c != '\t'));

Gnomon

This is using the generic overload of string.Join that will call ToString on each char returned by the query. Better to just pass the query results to the string constructor. s1 = new string(s.Where(....).ToArrary()); – Aubigny

Answer 7

The right choice really depends on how big the input string is and what the perforce and memory requirement are, but I would use a regular expression like

string result = Regex.Replace(s, @"\r\n?|\n|\t", String.Empty);

Or if we need to apply the same replacement multiple times, it is better to use a compiled version for the Regex like

var regex = new Regex(@"\r\n?|\n|\t", RegexOptions.Compiled); 
string result = regex.Replace(s, String.Empty);

NOTE: different scenarios requite different approaches to achieve the best performance and the minimum memory consumption

Coraliecoraline

Answer 8

This can be easily done using ReplaceLineEndings since .NET 6:

This method searches for all newline sequences within the string and canonicalizes them to the newline sequence provided by replacementText. If replacementText is Empty, all newline sequences within the string will be removed.

Note that it supports multiple types of newline sequences:

The list of recognized newline sequences is CR (U+000D), LF (U+000A), CRLF (U+000D U+000A), NEL (U+0085), LS (U+2028), FF (U+000C), and PS (U+2029). This list is given by the Unicode Standard, Sec. 5.8, Recommendation R4 and Table 5-2.

Rhododendron

Answer 9

Well... I would like you to understand more specific areas of space. \t is actually assorted as a horizontal space, not a vertical space. (test out inserting \t in Notepad)

If you use Java, simply use \v. See the reference below.

\h - A horizontal whitespace character:

[\t\xA0\u1680\u180e\u2000-\u200a\u202f\u205f\u3000]

\v - A vertical whitespace character:

[\n\x0B\f\r\x85\u2028\u2029]

But I am aware that you use .NET. So my answer to replacing every vertical space is..

string replacement = Regex.Replace(s, @"[\n\u000B\u000C\r\u0085\u2028\u2029]", "");

Legerdemain

It looks like an answer to some other question... and also missing actual reference... – Piteous

Answer 10

string remove = Regex.Replace(txtsp.Value).ToUpper(), @"\t|\n|\r", "");

Stoker

Would be great if your answer had more explanation. stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-answer – Zoan

Answer 11

You can use Trim if you want to remove from start and end.

string stringWithoutNewLine = "\n\nHello\n\n".Trim();

Danell

Answer 12

FYI,

Trim() does that already.

The following LINQPad sample:

void Main()
{
    var s = " \rsdsdsdsd\nsadasdasd\r\n ";
    s.Length.Dump();
    s.Trim().Length.Dump();
}

Outputs:

23
18

Daft

That doesn't remove the \n in the middle. – Customhouse