Python: Various methods to remove the newlines from a text file

The '\n' character represents the new line in python programming. However, this tutorial will show you various methods to remove the newlines from a text file.

Before starting, let us see the output of our file, which we want to remove all newlines from it.

# Open the file
my_file = open('my_file.txt', 'r')

# Read my_file with newlines character
output = repr(my_file.read())

# Output
print(output)

# Close the file
my_file.close()

Output:

'\nHello World\nHello Python\nHello Javascript\n

Note: I've used the repr() function to print the file's output with the '\n' character.

Now, let's get started.

Method #1: Remove newlines from a file using replace()

the replace() method replaces a specified phrase with another specified phrase. Therefore, we'll use this method to replace the newline character with a non-value.

Syntax

.replace('\n', '')

Example

# Open the file
my_file = open('my_file.txt', 'r')

# File's output
o = my_file.read()

# Remove all new lines from file
r_newlines = o.replace('\n', '')

# Result
print(r_newlines)

# Close the file
my_file.close()

Output:

Hello WorldHello PythonHello Javascript

method #2: Remove newlines from a file using splitlines()

The splitlines() method splits a string at the newline break and returns the result as a list.

However, we will use the splitlines() to split the file's output at '\n' and the join() method to join the result.

Syntax

"".join(file_output.splitlines())

Example

# Open the file
my_file = open('my_file.txt', 'r')

# File's output
o = my_file.read()

# Remove all new lines from the file.
r_newlines = "".join(o.splitlines())

# Result
print(r_newlines)

# Close the file
my_file.close()

Output:

Hello WorldHello PythonHello Javascript

Method #3: Remove newlines from a file using Regex

We can also use the re.sub() function to remove the newlines from a text file.

Syntax

re.sub('\n', '', output_file)

The sub() function works like replace() function.

Example

import re

# Open the File
my_file = open('my_file.txt', 'r')

# File's output
o = my_file.read()

# Remove all new lines from the file.
r_newlines = re.sub('\n', '', o)

# Result
print(r_newlines)

# Close the file
my_file.close()

Output:

Hello WorldHello PythonHello Javascript

Conclusion

We've learned different methods to remove the newlines from a text file in this article. Moreover, if you want to remove the newlines from the beginning or end of the text file, you should use strip() and rstrip() methods.