Hi All,
Here’s Rich’s explanation of BBEdit’s behavior.
I’m still not clear why Christopher seems to get different results.
HTH
Forwarded message:
From: Bare Bones Software Technical Support <[email protected]>
To: Bruce Van Allen <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: (Case 417198) Need to remove blank lines
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:04:01 +0000
Bruce,
Thanks for the additional detail.
To begin, a couple of definitions to clarify my subsequent remarks:
- an "empty" line is a line which contains no characters between its
beginning and its end.
- a "blank" line is a line which contains only whitespace characters
between its beginning and end.
To continue: "Process Lines Containing" is not a suitable tool for
removing empty lines from a document. The emphasis is on "Containing",
and empty lines don't contain anything. The operation will explicitly
skip empty lines (it won't attempt a literal match, and because the
line's contents are zero length, the regular-expression engine won't
bother searching).
Furthermore, when Process Lines Containing examines a line's contents,
those contents by definition do not include the line break character
at the end of the line.
You *can* use "Process Lines Containing" to remove _blank_ lines from
a document, but there are none in the example that you provided.
In order to remove empty *and* blank lines for a document, a Grep
replacement will do the job:
search for (grep): ^\s*$\n
replace with: (leave empty)
This is suitable because, unlike Process Lines Containing, Replace All
examines the entire contents of the document and not the inner
contents of each line in isolation.
Note that the "\n" at the end of the search pattern is necessary,
because without it, the replace operation would replace only the
*contents* of the empty/blank line with nothing. This would turn blank
lines into empty lines bout would not actually remove either.
I hope this helps, but please let us know if you have any other
questions.
Regards,
Rich Siegel
Bare Bones Software, Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: "Bruce Van Allen" <[email protected]>
Reply-To: "Bruce Van Allen" <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2021 20:03:03 -0800
To: "Bare Bones Software Technical Support" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: (Case 417198) Need to remove blank lines
On 13 Jan 2021, at 19:03, Bare Bones Software Technical Support
wrote:
May I trouble you to describe the issue you're having, and provide a
Zipped copy of a text file which is not behaving correctly?
I was responding to a post to the BBEdit g-group list from someone
who
needed advice about removing blank lines from a text file.
The original post was from Howard <[email protected]> at 2:28
PM,
Jan 13, 2021.
The OP’s sample text is below - note that in the G-group email it
didn’t seem to have the blank lines they’d described.
Anyway, members of the group began posting conflicting results with
using “Process Lines Containing…” to remove “blank” lines;
One person said using the regex ^$ didn’t work; another said using
^\h*$ DID work, with the optional horizontal space added. More
conflicting results were posted.
So I tried it, running BBEdit version 13.5.5 build 415089 on macOS v.
11.1.
My test file is attached. I used the OP’s text but added blank
lines.
When I try “Process Lines Containing…” with Grep checked
(screenshot attached) and the regex ^\s*$ — no lines are removed.
Same
with ^\h*$. But group member Christopher Stone posted that it works
for
him. So I reposted and asked people what versions they were using. I
included their responses in my message to support.
Sorry that wasn’t more clear.
OP’s sample text:
How can I remove all the blank lines? After doing that, I want to be
able
to paste the data back into a spreadsheet for further manipulation.
Rk Name Player Matching W L W-Lpct ERA GS CG SHO SV IP H R ER HR BB
SO
WHIP
SB CS WPA Tm
1 Max Scherzer\scherma01 Max Scherzer 84 56 8 0.875 1.56 84 8 4 0
584.1
294
107 101 53 89 787 0.66 16 5 21.1 WSN
2 Justin Verlander\verlaju01 Justin Verlander 80 49 11 0.817 1.72 80
5 3
0
554.0 269 114 106 59 88 693 0.64 9 7 18.9 DETHOU
3 Zack Greinke\greinza01 Zack Greinke 79 51 6 0.895 1.63 79 1 1 0
529.0
306
98 96 37 68 524 0.71 11 11 17.5 LADARIHOU
4 Clayton Kershaw\kershcl01 Clayton Kershaw 75 48 7 0.873 1.38 75 6 5
0
509.1 254 83 78 32 56 605 0.61 5 8 17.4 LAD
Best Regards,
- Bruce
Bruce Van Allen
PO Box 839
Santa Cruz CA 95061
Desk: 831-429-1688
Cell: 831-332-3649
[email protected]
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