How can I replace newlines using PowerShell?

Question

Given test.txt containing:

test message 

I want to end up with:

testing a message 

I think the following should work, but it doesn't:

Get-Content test.txt |% {$_-replace "t`r`n", "ting`r`na "} 

How can I do a find and replace where what I'm finding contains CRLF?

Answer 1

A CRLF is two characters, of course, the CR and the LF. However, `n consists of both. For example:

PS C:\> $x = "Hello >> World"  PS C:\> $x Hello World PS C:\> $x.contains("`n") True PS C:\> $x.contains("`r") False PS C:\> $x.replace("o`nW","o There`nThe W") Hello There The World PS C:\> 

I think you're running into problems with the `r. I was able to remove the `r from your example, use only `n, and it worked. Of course, I don't know exactly how you generated the original string so I don't know what's in there.

Answer 2

In my understanding, Get-Content eliminates ALL newlines/carriage returns when it rolls your text file through the pipeline. To do multiline regexes, you have to re-combine your string array into one giant string. I do something like:

$text = [string]::Join("`n", (Get-Content test.txt)) [regex]::Replace($text, "t`n", "ting`na ", "Singleline") 

Clarification: small files only folks! Please don't try this on your 40 GB log file :)