Eliminate newlines in google app script using regex

Question

I'm trying to write part of an add-on for Google Docs that eliminates newlines within selected text using replaceText. The obvious text.replaceText("\n",""); gives the error Invalid argument: searchPattern. I get the same error with text.replaceText("\r","");. The following attempts do nothing: text.replaceText("/\n/","");, text.replaceText("/\r/","");. I don't know why Google App Script does not allow for the recognition of newlines in regex.

I am aware that there is an add-on that does this already, but I want to incorporate this function into my add-on.

This error occurs even with the basic

DocumentApp.getActiveDocument().getBody().textReplace("\n","");

My full function:

function removeLineBreaks() {

var selection = DocumentApp.getActiveDocument().getSelection();
if (selection) {
    var elements = selection.getRangeElements();
    for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
        var element = elements[i];

        // Only deal with text elements

        if (element.getElement().editAsText) {
            var text = element.getElement().editAsText();

            if (element.isPartial()) {
                text.replaceText("\n","");
            }

            // Deal with fully selected text
            else {
                text.replaceText("\n","");
            }
        }
    }
}

// No text selected
else {
    DocumentApp.getUi().alert('No text selected. Please select some text and try again.');
}

}

Answer 1

It seems that in replaceText, to remove soft returns entered with Shift-ENTER, you can use \v:

.replaceText("\\v+", "")

If you want to remove all "other" control characters (C0, DEL and C1 control codes), you may use

.replaceText("\\p{Cc}+", "")

Note that the \v pattern is a construct supported by JavaScript regex engine, and is considered to match a vertical tab character (≡ \013) by the RE2 regex library used in most Google products.