How to get rid of lines surrounded by empty spaces?

Question

I have a text that looks something like this:

text
text
text


to remove

text
text
text


to remove
 

text
text
text

There are blocks of uninterupted text and I need to remove the lines that look like 'to remove' in the above example, there are 2 empty lines above them and 1 empty line below. Is there someway to programmatically remove those lines together with spaces that surround them in Python?

Answer 1

This should work:

l=[]
with open('yourfile.txt') as f:
    for i in f:
        l.append(i)

m=set()
for i in range(len(l)):
    if l[i].replace(' ', '')=='\n':
        m.add(i)
for i in range(1, len(l)-1):
    if l[i-1].replace(' ', '')=='\n' and l[i+1].replace(' ', '')=='\n':
        m.add(i)

result=[l[i] for i in range(len(l)) if i not in m]

with open('yourfile.txt', 'w') as f:
    for i in result:
        f.write(i)