I’ve got a long text file I need to reformat slightly. I think I need to use something called Regular Expressions but I’m not sure and don’t want to invest a lot of time learning to use them if they aren’t the right tool for the job.
My text file has paragraphs separated by three carriage returns. So it looks like this post.
I can go through by hand and remove the extra lines (I want 2 carriage returns between paragraphs) but it’s going to take forever to do manually.
Anyone know what’s the best way to accomplish this?
A good text editor with search-and-replace function that can handle special character codes like carriage returns will do this. Textpad is a good example, and it happens to use regular expression syntax for the character codes, but you don’t really need to learn much about RE to get this done, just that
is the regular expression for a newline character.
Once you’ve got the file loaded up in textpad (it can handle fairly large files - just how long is yours??) hit F8 to call up the replace dialog box, make sure that the ‘regular expression’ check box is ticked, and enter
for the find string and
for the replacement. Then replace all, and when that is done, close the dialog box and save.
Hope that helps.
(Assuming Microsoft software): Open the file in Notepad. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C to copy the whole text. Paste it into Word. Using Find & Replace, change ^p^p^p to ^p^p. Ctrl-A Ctrl-C, paste back into Notepad.
In vi,
:v/./.,/./-1join
will replace multiple blank lines with a single blank line.
Cheers GorillaMan (and everyone else) this worked a treat.