title: How can I get awk to ignore newlines in data?
body: <p>I regularly have to manipulate messy text data that I need to break into fields. </p>
  
  <p>I have had good experience using the backspace (008 decimal) as a field separator and delete (decimal 127) as record separator since those never appear in typed files. </p>
  
  <p>I can get a program to split everything the way I want, but I want to use awk too. It accepts <code>RS=&lt;delete&gt;</code> but it also breaks records on newline which I don't want.</p>
  
  <p>Obviously, I can replace newlines with some sort of sequence and flip it back, but is there a slicker way to do this?</p>