How To Remove Line Breaks
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The three line endings
Line breaks are the most environment-dependent characters in plain text. Windows uses CRLF, Unix uses LF, classic Mac used bare CR, and PDFs, emails, and scraped web pages mix all three with abandon. Removing line breaks sounds like a one-liner but actually requires you to decide what you’re preserving: paragraphs? Sentences? Bulleted structure? A blanket strip destroys structure; a naive regex misses one of the three line-ending variants. This guide covers the three line-ending types, the patterns that work across all of them, paragraph-preserving strategies, and the pitfalls that show up when you re-import the cleaned text into another tool.
Why the naive approach fails
Only three characters matter, and their combinations are the source of most pain:
The universal line-break regex
A file scraped from a Windows-origin email and saved through a Mac text editor can contain all three.
Flatten to single line
Match all three variants in any order:
Preserve paragraphs, flatten within
This matches CRLF as a unit (so you don’t double-replace), then bare CR, then bare LF. Order matters — put CRLF first.
Normalize first, then operate
Replace every break with a space, then collapse runs of spaces:
Preserving bulleted and numbered lists
Use this for copy-pasting text from a PDF into a word processor when each visual line is a soft line-break and you want running prose.
Handling soft-wrap from PDFs
Most copy-from-PDF cases want paragraphs preserved but single wraps flattened. Detect paragraph breaks (two or more line breaks in a row), replace single breaks with a space, then restore paragraphs.
Round-tripping: be reversible
Bulleted list items look like “- item” or “1. item” at the start of a line. Flattening them destroys the list. Detect them before flattening:
Bulk flatten across many files
This keeps breaks before bullet lines and flattens everywhere else. Adjust the character class for your bullet style.
When to keep line breaks
PDFs frequently break mid-word with a hyphen. Remove the hyphen and the break to re-flow:
Common mistakes
Watch out for genuine hyphenated compounds (“re-\nfactor” becomes “refactor” when you wanted “re-factor”). Hard to fix without a dictionary; usually acceptable.
Run the numbers
If you need to undo the cleanup, keep a copy of the original. Line break removal is not reliably reversible — once you collapse “end of sentence.\nNext sentence” to “end of sentence. Next sentence,” you can’t recover the original break. Version your text at each step.