I suspect that you want the Regular Expression Substitution command:

$foo =~ s/\n/ /g;
[download]

This will go through the whole of the string in $foo and globally ('cos of the trailing 'g') replace every \n with a space.

If your files are coming from a mac or a PC, you will need to change the pattern to match on

-- Ian Stuart
A man depriving some poor village, somewhere, of a first-class idiot.