Fart.exe replace two carriage returns in a row

Question

I have csv file where I'm trying to replace two carriage returns in a row with a single carriage return using Fart.exe. First off, is this possible? If so, the text within the CSV is laid out like the below where "CRLF" is an actual carriage return.

,CRLF
CRLF

But I want it to be just this without the extra carriage return on the second line:

,CRLF

I thought I could just do the below but it won't work:

CALL "C:\tmp\fart.exe" -C "C:\tmp\myfile.csv" ,\r\n\r\n ,\r\n

I need to know what to change ,\r\n\r\n to in order to make this work. Any ideas how I could make this happen? Thanks!

[Similar question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6925730/problems-with-replacing-newline) using powershell. — Compo, Sep 01 '17 at 17:40
Seems like you are just talking about removing an empty line. — Squashman, Sep 01 '17 at 18:30

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 01 '17 at 19:40

As Squashman has suggested, you are simply trying to remove empty lines.

There is no need for a 3rd party tool to do this. You can simply use FINDSTR to discard empty lines:

findstr /v "^$" myFile.txt >myFile.txt.new
move /y myFile.txt.new *. >nul

However, this will only work if all the lines end with CRLF. If you have a unix formatted file that ends each line with LF, then it will not work.

A more robust option would be to use JREPL.BAT - a regular expression command line text processing utility.

jrepl "^$" "" /r 0 /f myFile.txt /o -

Be sure to use CALL JREPL if you put the command within a batch script.

FART processes one line at a time, and the CRLF is not considered to be part of the line. So you can't use a normal FART command to remove CRLF. If you really want to use FART, then you will need to use the -B binary mode. You also need to use -C to get support for the escape sequences.

I've never used FART, so I can't be sure - but I believe the following would work

call fart -B -C myFile.txt "\r\n\r\n" "\r\n"

If you have many consecutive empty lines, then you will need to run the FART command repeatedly until there are no more changes.

Fart.exe replace two carriage returns in a row

1 Answers1