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Remove empty lines in text using Visual Studio or VS Code


How to remove empty lines in Visual Studio?


Solution

  • It's very useful especially if you want to arrange or compare codes, thanks to the people who answer this question, I've got the answer from here and would like to share it with Stackoverflow:

    Visual Studio (Visual Studio Code) has the ability to delete empty lines in replace operation using regular expressions.

    • Click Ctrl-H (quick replace)

    • Tick "Use Regular Expressions"

    • In Find specify ^$\n

    • In Replace box delete everything.

    • Click "Replace All"

    All empty lines will be deleted.

    Regular expression for empty line consists of

    Beginning of line ^

    End of line $

    Line break \n

    Note that normally in Windows an end of line indicated by 2 characters - Carriage Return (CR, ASCII 13, \r) Line Feed (LF, ASCII 10, \n).

    A regex to remove blank lines that are/aren't really blank (i.e. they do/don't have spaces): ^:b*$\n

    To remove double lines: ^:b*\n:b*\n replace with: \n

    *** for Visual Studio 2013 and above:***

    ^\s*$\n
    

    and for double lines:

    ^(?([^\r\n])\s)*\r?\n(?([^\r\n])\s)*\r?\n
    

    See the regular expression syntax updates for VS2012 and above in @lennart's answer below