removing newline chars and appending

[shea]

I have an oracle export which contains records with varying number of columns depending on the record type. Each record type has its own distinct record-header(4). Some record types have columns of free text which include newline characters.<br><br>I want to append all the free text i.e. remove the newline characters in the free text column but I want to retain the newline characters at the end of each record .<br><br>Is there an easier way of doing this than appending all records in the file and breaking the file by record-header