Term for removing/replacing line-breaks

Question

I'm looking for a good term for removing line-breaks from a piece of text and replacing them with a special line-break marker. (Like how, when quoting poetry, we use "/" to represent a break; though my case is in a software context, the goal being amenability to line-oriented tools like grep.)

Since various RFCs use the term "linear white space" (LWSP) to refer to within-line whitespace (namely tabs and spaces), I'm considering the term "linearize"; but I'm afraid that it might be too opaque, since there are so many other kinds of linearization. I want to use this term as the name of a function/method/procedure/subroutine that performs this transformation, so it should ideally stand on its own and convey at least a rough idea of what the transformation is.

Answer 1

I would suggest flatten, as it conveys a visual image of what the transformation will achieve.

Answer 2

In UNIX, the term for this operation has long been referred to as joining, from the ed/sed/vi/emacs command that appends lines end to end.

(.,.+1)j
Joins the addressed lines. The addressed lines are deleted from the buffer and replaced by a single line containing their joined text. The current address is set to the resultant line.
_{GNU ed Manual}

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In Vim you can join two lines together, which means that the line break between them is deleted. The "J" command does this.
_{Vim documentation}

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M-^
Merge the previous and the current line (delete-indentation). This “joins” the two lines cleanly, by replacing any indentation at the front of the current line, together with the line boundary, with a single space.
_{GNU Emacs Manual}

(The old binding for M-^ used to be join-line, but that command has been turned into an alias for delete-indentation in newer versions of GNU Emacs.)

Answer 3

In computer terms you could refer to the line break as the End of Line sequence (EOL) or line delimiter. So you want to operate globally (meaning all occurrences in the file) on the EOL by either:

• find and replace
• substitution
• transliteration

The last term is use in the Perl language http://codewalkers.com/c/a/Programming-Basics/The-Transliteration-Operator-in-Perl/

So as a term, something like line break substitution could work

While the file will now appear flat when viewed in a text editor, I wouldn't use the tewm flatten or linearize. A file is just a sequence of bytes, so it is really linear to begin with. We jut denote EOL as the symbol to add line breaks.