The shell is probably what is sanitizing your arguments. How did you try to call it? With single-quotes around the strings, I hope?

Incidentally, there is a shell tool that will squeeze newlines. 

tr -s '\n' < file > file.squeezed

[download]
I'm afraid your script has no real advantage over the one-liner: 
perl -pe 's/from-expression/to-expression/g' file > new_file

[download]
or the essentially-the-same 
sed 's/from-expression/to-expression/g' file > new_file

[download]
Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

In reply to Re: Getopt, regexen, and newlines by Roy Johnson
in thread Getopt, regexen, and newlines by apotheon

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