(SO answer repost) You can use kafkacat to send messages to Kafka that include line breaks. To do this, use its -D operator to specify a custom message delimiter (in this example /): kafkacat -b kafka:29092 \ -t test_topic_01 \ -D/ \ -P <<EOF this is a string message with a line break/this is another message with two line breaks! EOF Note that the delimiter must be a single byte - multi-byte chars will end up getting included in the resulting message See issue #140