Question

I understand these are escape characters but how do I read from a XML document and ignore them? I’m using XmlDocument, by the way.

Answer 1

The string you read from the file does not literally contain "\r\n". Those are escape sequences. '\r' and '\n' represent a carriage-return and new-line character, respectively, which form together a line break.

If you’re looking with the VS debugger at the string, however, you may see the escape sequences instead of actual line breaks. From MSDN:

Note
At compile time, verbatim strings are converted to ordinary strings with all the same escape sequences. Therefore, if you view a verbatim string in the debugger watch window, you will see the escape characters that were added by the compiler, not the verbatim version from your source code. For example, the verbatim string @"C:\files.txt" will appear in the watch window as "C:\\files.txt".

Example:

var mystring = "Hello\r\nWorld";

Console.Write(mystring);

Output:

Hello
World

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If you actually want to get rid of line breaks in a string, you can, for example, use a regex:

var result = Regex.Replace(mystring, @"\s+", " ");

// result == "Hello World";