Question

I just wrote some code to strip extra newlines from some text. Every set of contiguous newlines gets collapsed into a single newline.

This seems like it might be a good place to use LINQ to simplify the code. Although I’m pretty new to LINQ and so not sure how to do this. Can anyone suggest a solution?

Here is my original code:

/// <summary>
/// Collapse extra newlines.
/// </summary>
private string CollapseNewlines(string script)
{
    // Remove extra newlines.
    var lines = script.Split('\n');

    var output = new StringBuilder();

    bool prevLineWasEmpty = false;

    foreach (var line in lines)
    {
        if (line.Trim() == string.Empty)
        {
            if (prevLineWasEmpty)
            {
                continue; // Ignore this line.
            }

            prevLineWasEmpty = true;
        }
        else
        {
            prevLineWasEmpty = false;
        }

        output.Append(line);
        output.Append("\n");
    }

    return output.ToString();
}

Answer 1

try this:

var lines = script.Split('\n')
            .Where(line => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(line));

string output = string.Join("\n", lines);