Frustrated by Magento? Then you’ll love
Often, when dealing with text files in my day-to-day duties, I’ll end up with large gaps of newlines and white space that I want to zap. Something line
this is a line
this is another line
This is, yet another, line.
[this is an invisible tab chacater]
More lines!
A decade ago I’d spend tedious/precious minutes going through the file manually and cleaning up the extra lines. Now I just search on the following regular expression and replace it with a single newline
\n[\n\s]+
Or, broken out /x style
\n #a new-line character
[\n\s]+ #a character class consisting of any
#newline character (\n) or white space (\s),
#repeated one or more times (+)
Keep in mind if you’re using BBEdit, you’ll need to use \r instead of \n, since Bare Bones interpreted Apple’s lack-of-official documentation on OS X’s line endings to mean “keep using \r”.
Originally published May 13, 2007