retaining newline characters when writing to file

[Fredrik Lundh]

John Salerno wrote:

> If I read a string that contains a newline character(s) into a variable, 
> then write that variable to a file, how can I retain those newline 
> characters so that the string remains on one line rather than spans 
> multiple lines?

you cannot: the whole point of a newline character is to start a new line.

however, some file formats let you "escape" the newline.  for example, 
in Python source code, you can use end a line with a backslash.  in CSV, 
you can put the string with newlines inside quotes, and Python's "csv" 
module knows how to do that:

	import csv, sys

	row = ("One\nTwo\nThree", 1, 2, 3)

	writer = csv.writer(sys.stdout)
	writer.writerow(row)

prints

	"One
	Two
	Three",1,2,3

(not all CSV readers can handle multiline rows, though)

</F>