Removing multiple newline characters from git history

Question

I was trying to clean my repo from multiple empty lines in code (more than 4) with bfg repo cleaner. I tried various regular expressions, but didn't come up with a solution. The closest result I achieved was simply removing all new lines from a file.

Any ideas how I can do this with bfg or any other tool?

Answer 1

You can use this regular expression:

(\r?\n){4,}

And replace it with this

\n

• It will accept the UNIX and the Windows linebreak (\r?\n).
• It matches if at least 4 line endings are consecutive (without spaces on each of the lines)
• All the consecutive linebreak characters are replaced by a single UNIX linebreak (\n)

---

Here is an executable example:

var text = document.getElementById("main").innerHTML; // read HTML because it is easier to write linebreaks in HTML
var regex = /(\r?\n){4,}/g;
var replacement = "\n";

var result = text.replace(regex, replacement);
console.log(text);
console.log(result);

<div id="main">








line1




line2


line3





</div>