Newline in bash variable

With bash, if you want to embed newlines in a string, enclose the string with $'':

$ list="One\ntwo\nthree\nfour"
$ echo "$list"
One\ntwo\nthree\nfour
$ list=$'One\ntwo\nthree\nfour'
$ echo "$list"
One
two
three
four

And if you have such a string already in a variable, you can read it line-by-line with:

while IFS= read -r line; do
    echo "... $line ..."
done <<< "$list"

You don't show what you do with $r, but I bet it's

echo $r

You need to enclose the variable in double quotes to preserve the newlines

echo "$r"

Unquoted, the variable is subject to word splitting, where any sequences of whitespace ¹ (including newlines) are replaced by a single space ¹

¹: by default, depends on the contents of $IFS (default: space, tab, newline)