You applied \s??
\s is a character class and you need to optionally match it or a literal "\n" between each character it has no effect on the nature of the data you are comparing it to.

You are however correct to say that you need to change the way you read the data in from the file, or at least the way it is represented when comparing to the regular expression

(hint 2:Look up the input record separator and see what can be done by redefining it (this is sometimes refereed to as slurping a file)