Golang: Issues replacing newlines in a string from a text file

Question

I've been trying to have a File be read, which will then put the read material into a string. Then the string will get split by line into multiple strings:

absPath, _ := filepath.Abs("../Go/input.txt")
data, err := ioutil.ReadFile(absPath)
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}
input := string(data)

The input.txt is read as:

a

strong little bird

with a very

big heart

went

to school one day and

forgot his food at

home

However,

re = regexp.MustCompile("\\n")
input = re.ReplaceAllString(input, " ")

turns the text into a mangled mess of:

homeot his food atand

I'm not sure how replacing newlines can mess up so badly to the point where the text inverts itself

Answer 1

I guess that you are running the code using Windows. Observe that if you print out the length of the resulting string, it will show something over 100 characters. The reason is that Windows uses not only newlines (\n) but also carriage returns (\r) - so a newline in Windows is actually \r\n, not \n. To properly filter them out of your string, use:

re := regexp.MustCompile(`\r?\n`)
input = re.ReplaceAllString(input, " ")

The backticks will make sure that you don't need to quote the backslashes in the regular expression. I used the question mark for the carriage return to make sure that your code works on other platforms as well.

Answer 2

I do not think that you need to use regex for such an easy task. This can be achieved with just

absPath, _ := filepath.Abs("../Go/input.txt")
data, _ := ioutil.ReadFile(absPath)
input := string(data)
strings.Replace(input, "\n","",-1)

example of removing \n