60

Suppose I have these lines:

A

B

C

D

E

I want remove empty lines, and the spaces before the letter too, like this:

A
B
C
D
E

How can I achieve this in Notepad++?

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1
  • 1
    no idea, perfectly fine question imo. btw can you check if the formatting is correct for your spaces. Is there meant to be four spaces before a character (if so, add 4 more per line so the site's formatting takes this into account)
    – Jay Wick
    Jul 19, 2013 at 11:09

8 Answers 8

Reset to default
73

To get rid of leading space(s) and all empty lines (even if the empty line contains spaces or tabs)

  1. Go to Search -> Replace
  2. Select "Regular expression" under Search mode.
  3. Use ^\s* for "Find what" and leave "Replace with" blank.
  4. Click Replace all

Regex explanation:

  • ^ means beginning of the line
  • \s* means any number (even 0) of whitespace characters. Whitespace characters include tab, space, newline, and carriage return.
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4
  • What would you search for to remove trailing white spaces if ^\s* is beginning of line?
    – Aaron
    Dec 12, 2014 at 16:04
  • 1
    An alternativeo to \s* would be \s+ for one or more white spaces?
    – ian_scho
    Sep 8, 2015 at 11:06
  • 2
    @Aaron: Search for \s+$ to remove trailing whitespace.
    – palswim
    Oct 15, 2015 at 21:16
  • 1
    -1 This also deletes the indent
    – Black
    Jan 6, 2018 at 12:27
48

Edit -> Line Operations -> Remove Empty Lines or alternatively: Edit -> Line Operations -> Remove Empty Lines (Containing Blank characters)

enter image description here

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2
  • 3
    So cool! I never noticed there is so many edit options in Edit menu. Thanks!
    – icl7126
    Jul 16, 2014 at 14:53
  • 3
    This is what most people are looking for when then come to StackOverflow for this question, unfortunately the "\r\n" and "^\s*" answers are "Cooler", takes me 5 minutes to find this answer with Google. Those other answers are kind of self explanatory (with a little knowledge of regular expressions and escape chars), this in the one that actually saves you time...
    – BillyNair
    Mar 18, 2015 at 3:09
8

Go to Edit > Line Operations > Remove Empty Lines

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1
  • No reason to downvote this. It is a perfectly valid answer.
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Jul 15, 2016 at 19:33
6

The easy way would be select everything (Ctrl+A), go to Edit>Blank Operation>Trim Trailing Space.

This should remove all the spaces in between.

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0
1

You could use a simple regular expression search and replace.

  1. Click Ctrl+H for the Replace dialog
  2. Make sure you select 'Regular expression' option
  3. Find what: ____(.)\r_ (swap _ with space, as it doesn't format right on this site)
  4. Replace with: \1

Change the spaces as you need because I think this site is not showing the exact spaces you need.

Find and Replace dialog in Notepad++

I recommend tailor making your regular expression using this tutorial and this cheat sheet.

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0

Press Ctrl+H to open Find and Replace dialog Box, and enter like below.

  1. Type \r\n\r\n in Find what
  2. Type \r\n in Replace with
  3. Select Extended in Search Mode
    [\r -> Carriage Return & \n ->Line Feed] It will even removes uneven line spaces.Just continue clicking REPLACE ALL till you attain the expected result. Hope this helps!
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-1

Copy 2 blank spaces (Ctrl+C), search and replace (Ctrl+H), paste in the Find field and select Replace. If you have the same character with a blank space behind or in front, copy the character with the blank and replace it with the same character without the blank.

No complicated commands, which, by the way, didn't work for me.

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1
  • 1
    This sound like removing spaces, not line feeds.
    – Jan Doggen
    Dec 5, 2014 at 11:23
-1

Go to Edit > Blank Operations > Remove Unnecessary Blank and EOL

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1
  • -1. This places everything in a single line.
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Nov 10, 2017 at 7:33

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