Question

Also is it possible to combine this with removing periods from within the string? The sentence may have spaces which I’d like to keep.

Answer 1

Search for

^[\r\n]+|\.|[\r\n]+$

and replace with nothing.

The specific syntax will depend on the language you’re using, e. g. in C#:

resultString = Regex.Replace(subjectString, @"^[\r\n]+|\.|[\r\n]+$", "");

in PHP:

$result = preg_replace('/^[\r\n]+|\.|[\r\n]+$/', '', $subject);

in JavaScript:

result = subject.replace(/^[\r\n]+|\.|[\r\n]+$/g, "");

etc…