If your intention was just to group this strings, then chomp in a perl one-liner could do the job.
Case (a):

perl -pe "chomp;" text.txt
[download]

this is equalvalent to:

LINE: while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) {
    chomp $_;
}
continue {
    die "-p destination: $!\n" unless print $_;
}
[download]

Case (b):

perl -ne "chomp;print" text.txt
[download]

which is equalvalent to:

LINE: while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) {
    chomp $_;
    print $_;
}
[download]

Hope this helpss -:)