remove all line breaks (enter symbols) from the string using R

Question

How to remove all line breaks (enter symbols) from the string?

my_string <- "foo\nbar\rbaz\r\nquux" 

I've tried gsub("\n", "", my_string), but it doesn't work, because new line and line break aren't equal.

Answer 1

You need to strip \r and \n to remove carriage returns and new lines.

x <- "foo\nbar\rbaz\r\nquux" gsub("[\r\n]", "", x) ## [1] "foobarbazquux" 

Or

library(stringr) str_replace_all(x, "[\r\n]" , "") ## [1] "foobarbazquux" 

Answer 2

I just wanted to note here that if you want to insert spaces where you found newlines the best option is to use the following:

gsub("\r?\n|\r", " ", x) 

which will insert only one space regardless whether the text contains \r\n, \n or \r.