Question

I want to transform this

a

b


b

into this

a
b
b

number of empty lines is variable and can be pretty huge. Empty lines contains spaces. I want to use a regexp like \r\n( *\r\n)+, but notepad++ seems not to like those special characters in regexp, tryed also \\r\\n( *\\r\\n)+

Please note that empty lines may contain spaces, so the correct regexp would be something like \\r\\n( *\\r\\n)+

Answer 1

You can do ‘replace all’ multiple times on

\r\n\r\n -> \r\n

That’s with ‘Extended’ option selected, not ‘Regular expression’.

If the empty line contains spaces, then first replace all lines with only spaces with nothing using regex: ^\s+$ -> ''. Then to the extended replacement above.

Alternatively:

You can also replace all \r\n with some sequence of characters that doesn’t exists in the document, e.g. ### then use the following regex replacement : '###(\s*###)+' -> '###' and finally replace back the sequence (‘###’) with \r\n.