How do I remove blank lines from a text file and join the lines separated by the blank line?

Question

I have a text file which some of the entries look like this:

"Hello, my name is

George. Its very nice to meet you"

and I would like to run an SED or AWK command that gives me the following result:

"Hello, my name is George. Its very nice to meet you"

I know I can remove blank lines with SED by running:

sed '/^\s*$/d'

That command only removes the blank line but it does not join the string as shown above.

Thanks

Possible duplicate of [How can I replace a newline (\n) using sed?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1251999/how-can-i-replace-a-newline-n-using-sed) — Andreas Louv, Mar 21 '16 at 23:07

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 21 '16 at 21:59

2

I would use awk:

awk 'BEGIN{RS="\n\n";ORS=" "}1' file

The command is using two newlines (a blank line) as the input separator and a space as the output record separator.

1 is an awk idiom. It will always evaluate to true which makes awk print every record.

Btw, if your blank lines may contain whitespace, change the command to:

awk 'BEGIN{RS="\n[[:space:]]*\n";ORS=" "}1' file

answered Mar 21 '16 at 21:59

hek2mgl

Thank you so much for your response. It did work with a test file I created but it does not work on the file I need to fix. Perhaps there are some garbage characters in the supposedly empty lines? I do not see any. – Leonus Mar 21 '16 at 22:10
Probably the file you are working on is from Windows? – hek2mgl Mar 21 '16 at 22:13

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 21 '19 at 11:42

0

Go menu -> Edit -> Line operations - Choose "Remove Empty Lines" in Notepad ++

in one click all extra lines get removed :)

answered Jul 21 '19 at 11:42

Lakshay Sharma

2 Answers2