is there a REMOVE UNNECESSARY BLANK only (not EOL also)?

Chris Tanguay 0

Is there any way to run only the “remove unnecessary blank” (Edit\Blank Operations), but leave off the “and EOL” part?
I find I’m dealing with lots of text that has extra spaces mixed in. Looking for a quick way to expunge them. But not the EOL’s.
Maybe via a plugin?
If not that (gulp), then dare I ask for someone to toss me a regex line?
Thx. - Chris

Terry R

@Chris-Tanguay-0 said in is there a REMOVE UNNECESSARY BLANK only (not EOL also)?:

If not that (gulp), then dare I ask for someone to toss me a regex line?

Well, you are right to ask as the “built-in” option will indeed do extraneous blanks and EOLs all in one swipe. Your request is not an option using the built-ins, perhaps it could be. To do so that would require a feature request, which would need to be placed on github, more details on how to do so are here, in our FAQ section.

But to get back to the question in hand. Looking back over your other posts I see you have asked quite a few questions and have been requested to start helping yourself by reading up on regular expressions. This particular question is one that a beginner should be able to figure out, but I will at least help out a bit.

For most questions I usually start of by writing (or thinking) in English what my steps would be. the actual “programming” is the very last step and if the “English” is logical the programming is generally achieved within a couple of tries. So what would be the process in English, well:

Find a blank space
look ahead and see if another exists, if so remove.

This seems good for 2 blanks, but what about more than 2 together? Well, we adjust the process so that we:

Find MANY blank spaces together
return ONLY 1 blank space

At this point I’d be happy with the process and I’d create the regex. I’ll leave that step up to you.

Terry

Neil Schipper

@Chris-Tanguay-0 Your request would benefit from being less ambiguously specified. Presuming “Trim leading and trailing” doesn’t satisfy your need, are you clear about whether you want every run of 2 consecutive spaces deleted? collapsed into a single space?

Chris Tanguay 0

@Terry-R
Thanks for your thoughtful and linear reply. Have I had the time I really need to dedicate – to sitting down a few hours each day, with the regex walk-through sites, playing, toying, testing, tinkering? Getting better at it a little bit at a time? I guess shamefully, not even close. Life has been dealing me a whopper of a meal as of late. I do realize, given time, I could master pretty much every nook and cranny of regex. But not likely to happen until early winter… like maybe Mid December, when we have our short shutdown period where i work. That’s when I’ll get a first chance to actually take a breath. All my posts have come from work context… were I live and love my NP++.
Is there any kind of regex reference site that has an AI type search… where I could type in what I’m looking to do, and it takes me to ‘closest matches’? Can you hear my angst? Ha!
Anyway, to answer what Neil was asking… I’m only talking about text sentences. Like this example:

So, no real leading or trailing space issues ever in my examples. I just need to convert any 2 or more consecutive spaces found, into 1 space. It could be 2 spaces, or it could be 50 spaces. Totally random. ANd that includes between period and next character.
So, to answer your question, it could be either 2 spaces, or many spaces.
I could create one of those pipe expressions like this (and put it into a macro):

… where each pipe is incrementally higher # of spaces (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10)…
and replace all of those with a single space…
But that only covers me through 10 consecutive spaces…
Hey, at least I’m trying to think outside the box!
Sorry to all if my collective posts have been a bit of a nag.

PeterJones

This post is deleted!

PeterJones

@Chris-Tanguay-0 said in is there a REMOVE UNNECESSARY BLANK only (not EOL also)?:

I just need to convert any 2 or more consecutive spaces found

FIND = \x20+ (this could be space-plus, +)
REPLACE = \x20 (this could be a single space)
SEARCH MODE = regular expression

\x20 is a way of representing the space character that is easy to read/copy/paste from the forum; I mention both for ease of use. So if you’re typing, just type the characters for space and plus in the SEARCH dialog; if you’d rather copy/paste, it’s probably better for the \x20 version.

BTW: this is what @Terry-R was hinting at, suggesting that you could easily figure out how to use regular expressions to search for more than one space and convert it to a single space… because that’s about the simplest modifier (+) in regular expressions.

It will behoove you to start learning this on your own.

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