Remove CRLF Not Preceded by a Space

Wayne Aprato

I have a text file that contains 10000 records exported from DataPerfect. There are many unwanted CRLFs that I need to remove. Most of the problem CRLFs are NOT preceded by a space. The valid CRLFs are usually preceded by a space.

Is there a way that I can use the replace function to remove the CRLFs that are NOT preceded by a space?
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Scott Sumner

@Wayne-Aprato

Any decent text editor has a way of doing what you need and Notepad++ is no exception.

Invoke the Replace dialog, and then:

Find-what zone: (?<!\x20)\r\n
Replace-with zone: make sure this zone has nothing in it
Search-mode setting: Regular expression
Action: your choice of Replace or Replace All

So in essence what the FInd-what formula is doing is finding a CRLF pair (the \r\n part), and then looking at the character immediately preceding. If it is NOT a space character (\x20), then that particular CRLF pair gets replaced (with nothing as that is what is specified in Replace with), otherwise it is left as it is.

Wayne Aprato

Thanks Scott. Much appreciated.