Dealing with newlines in sed can be tricky, because of how sed naturally deals with new lines. For example, let's say you have a file or variable that contains the text "Hello World". This text will end with a new line.
Hello\n
World\n
How\n
are\n
you\n
today?\n
When using sed to manipulate the file or varilable, sed will not do any sort of manipulation against the new line. For example, if you replace the word "World" with "Earth", the new line remains.
Hello\n
Earth\n
How\n
are\n
you\n
today?\n
Remove new lines
In this example, new lines are replaced with a single whitespace.
~]# sed ':label; N; $! b label; s|\n| |g' file.txt
Hello World How are you today?