How can I replace newlines using PowerShell?

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?

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.

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 :)

With -Raw you should get what you expect

If you want to remove all new line characters and replace them with some character (say comma) then you can use the following.

(Get-Content test.txt) -join ","

This works because Get-Content returns array of lines. You can see it as tokenize function available in many languages.