[PLUG] Emacs: change \n\n to \n

Steve Dum dr.doom at frontier.com
Fri Nov 11 17:43:08 UTC 2016


The second pattern looks more like a  perl pattern but not quite the 
right one.
multiline searches in perl require a /m option on the search to more 
than one ^ and $.
Also on the replace side ^ and $ are just  literally the ^ and $ char's.

Switching to answer the question - 'how can I do this with some tool'
in vim
  :%s/^\n$// does what you asked for.  ^ and $ apply only on the search 
side meaning beginning and end of a line and and they don't match the 
line separator (for linux \n and the replacement is literally nothing //
Of course if you have dos line termination or other weird stuff matching 
would have to include \r and \n
in the approximate order say :%s/^[\n\r]*$//  and to complicate things 
even more 'blank lines' in formatted
text are often not ^$ but contain white space, which would lead 
to:%s/^\s*[\n\r]*\s*$//


Rich Shepard wrote:
>     Large files have a mix of single and double line spacings. I want to
> convert double spaced lines to single space lines but cannot find the
> appropriate regex search and replace syntax. Looking in the emacs wiki and
> other web sites suggested that C-q C-j C-q C-j + would do the job, but it
> does not. Neither does (search) ^$^$ (replace) ^$.
>
>     I thought this was a simple request but the answer is avoiding me.
>
> TIA,
>
> Rich
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