Removing ~\r\n characters in a File [duplicate] - command-line

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CScript and VBS to Remove Line Breaks from Text File
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Closed 1 year ago.
I have the following file, where each new line is created with the characters ~\r\n<CR><LF>.
Sample test file
I want to remove all occurrences of ~\r\n<CR><LF> and replace with "" (empty string) so that all the file data appears on a single line. To do this, I wrote a script in VBScript (replace.vbs) and I run it in the commandline with cscript replace.vbs "~\r\n<CR><LF>" "" - the first parameter is the original characters I want replace and the second parameter is the new text to write into the file.
My script can successfully replace regular text - for example, if I pass only <CR><LF> as the string to replace, it will work as expected. But my issue is when I pass the full ~\r\n<CR><LF>, it does not modify the file at all. I think it has something to do with the ~\r\n characters being incorrectly passed into the command.
The following is my script:
Const ForReading = 1
Const ForWriting = 2
strOldText = Wscript.Arguments(0)
strNewText = Wscript.Arguments(1)
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
objStartFolder = "D:\FTP\Private\EDI\KleinschmidtTemp\"
Set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(objStartFolder)
Set colFiles = objFolder.Files
For Each objFile in colFiles
if instr(objFile.Name,"BRO") <> 0 and instr(objFile.Name,".edi") <> 0 then
Set objFileToRead = objFSO.OpenTextFile(objStartFolder + objFile.Name, ForReading)
strText = objFileToRead.ReadAll
objFileToRead.Close
strNewText = Replace(strText, strOldText, strNewText)
Set objFileToEdit = objFSO.OpenTextFile(objStartFolder + objFile.Name, ForWriting)
objFileToEdit.WriteLine strNewText
objFileToEdit.Close
objFSO.MoveFile objStartFolder + objFile.Name, "D:\FTP\Private\EDI\Kleinschmidt\Outgoing\" + objFile.Name
end if
Next
EDIT: So I found out that for our production files, <CR><LF> will not be plaintext - they are actually non printable ASCII control characters. So I made the following change to my script, I used the Chr() function to get these characters and properly replace them.
Const ForReading = 1
Const ForWriting = 2
'strOldText = Wscript.Arguments(0)
'strNewText = Wscript.Arguments(1)
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
objStartFolder = "D:\FTP\Private\EDI\KleinschmidtTemp\"
Set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(objStartFolder)
Set colFiles = objFolder.Files
For Each objFile in colFiles
if instr(objFile.Name,"BRO") <> 0 and instr(objFile.Name,".edi") <> 0 then
Set objFileToRead = objFSO.OpenTextFile(objStartFolder + objFile.Name, ForReading)
strText = objFileToRead.ReadAll
objFileToRead.Close
'strNewText = Replace(strText, strOldText, strNewText)
strNewText = Replace(strText, Chr(10), "") ' 10 is ASCII code for LF, line feed
strNewText = Replace(strNewText, Chr(13), "") ' 13 is ASCII code for CR, carriage return
Set objFileToEdit = objFSO.OpenTextFile(objStartFolder + objFile.Name, ForWriting)
objFileToEdit.WriteLine strNewText
objFileToEdit.Close
'objFSO.MoveFile objStartFolder + objFile.Name, "D:\FTP\Private\EDI\Kleinschmidt\Outgoing\" + objFile.Name
end if
Next
I still have one issue though... When I open the resulting file, everything is on a single line which is what I want. But my script does not remove the <CR><LF> at the very end of the file, so there is an extra blank line. How can I fix this?
New resulting file

Answer 1

This is far easier to do from the command line or in a batch file. But since you are using VBScript, here's what you need to do.
First, do away with the script arguments. Passing control characters to a script argument would be a nightmare to get working correctly. Instead, we'll hardcode the search into the script. If you absolutely need to do this using arguments, comment and I'll update the script to do that but it gets a lot more confusing.
Const ForReading = 1
Const ForWriting = 2
' strOldText = Wscript.Arguments(0)
strOldText = "~" & vbCrLf & "<CR><LF>"
' strNewText = Wscript.Arguments(1)
strNewText = ""
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
objStartFolder = "D:\FTP\Private\EDI\KleinschmidtTemp\"
Set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(objStartFolder)
Set colFiles = objFolder.Files
For Each objFile in colFiles
if instr(objFile.Name,"BRO") <> 0 and instr(objFile.Name,".edi") <> 0 then
Set objFileToRead = objFSO.OpenTextFile(objStartFolder + objFile.Name, ForReading)
strText = objFileToRead.ReadAll
objFileToRead.Close
strNewText = Replace(strText, strOldText, strNewText)
Set objFileToEdit = objFSO.OpenTextFile(objStartFolder + objFile.Name, ForWriting)
objFileToEdit.WriteLine strNewText
objFileToEdit.Close
objFSO.MoveFile objStartFolder + objFile.Name, "D:\FTP\Private\EDI\Kleinschmidt\Outgoing\" + objFile.Name
end if
Next
EDIT
In response to the edit, you are adding the extra line to the file when you write it back. You're using:
objFileToEdit.WriteLine
The WriteLine method appends a new line character to the end of your string. Just use Write instead.
objFileToEdit.Write strNewText

Answer 2

I would try "~" & vbCrLF & "" as the search. vbCrLf is the constant for the new line carriage return combo.

Answer 3

You can do this in Notepad++, by turning on the 'Extended' Search Mode on in the find in replace dialog box. replace \r\n with \n.
It also appears you are doing this from a Window's machine, and if you have Cygwin, or git bash on your system you can also use sed, for example:
sed -i sed 's/\r$//' input
If you don't want to edit the file in place, and test the results exclude the -i flag.