How to remove newlines from a string in Python 3?

Problem

You have a very long string or one that include newline escape characters (\n). You would like to use Python 3 in order to automatically delete those appended newlines added to your string.

Strip newlines / line breaks from a Python string

In this post, we will outline three methods that you can use to delete newlines from a string. In this post we’ll discuss each technique and post example code that you can use to follow along.

Using rstrip() method:

The rstrip() method removes any trailing character at the end of the string. By using this method, we can remove newlines in the provided string value.

Code:

def removelines(value):
    return value.rstrip()

mystring = 'This is my string. \n'
print("Actual string:",mystring)
print("After deleting the new line:",removelines(mystring))

Output:

Actual string: This is my string

After deleting the new line: This is my string.

Using replace() method:

To remove any of the newlines found between a string, we can use the replace method and get the newline removed.

Code:

def removelines(value):
    return value.replace('\n','')

mystring = 'This is my string \nThis comes in the next line.'
print("Actual string:",mystring)
print("After deleting the new line:",removelines(mystring))

Output:

Actual string: This is my string
This comes in the next line.
After deleting the new line: This is my string This comes in the next line.

Using splitlines() method:

The splitlines() method helps to convert the lines into a split list. Hence, we can split our string into a list and then join it to form a string value.

Code:

def removelines(value):
    return ''.join(value.splitlines())

mystring = 'This is my string \nThis comes in the next line.'
print("Actual string:",mystring)
print("After deleting the new line:",removelines(mystring))

Output:

Actual string: This is my string
This comes in the next line.
After deleting the new line: This is my string This comes in the next line.

Removing newlines from a Python list

In a similar fashion you can easily strip newlines off a list of strings.

Let’s assume you have the following list:

orig_lst = ['Python', 'R', 'GO\n', 'Haskell']

We can easily strip the newlines off the list elements with a list comprehension and the rstrip() function:

new_lst = [x.rstrip() for x in orig_lst]
print(new_lst)

Here’s is the result:

['Python', 'R', 'GO', 'Haskell']

Alternatively we can obtain the same result by using the replace() function:

new_lst = [x.replace('\n','') for x in orig_lst]

We can also replace the newline characters with a space:

new_lst = [x.replace('\n',' ') for x in orig_lst]