Remove forced 70-80 char line limit from multiple text files

Freshenstein

I have a few dozen very old text files and in each paragraph the lines are broken into lines of 70-80 characters. What would the RegEx expression be so that I could go about deleting those line breaks and making each paragraph one long line?

Example:

This is all a paragraph
blah blah blah
ETC

into:

This is all a paragraph blah blah blah ETC

Pierre Åberg

Not sure if this is the “best way” to do it, but I would try something like:

Find what: \s
Replace with: “space”

This would result in:
This is all a paragraph blah blah blah ETC

After that I would do it again but this time with
Find what: \s\s
Replace with: “space”

This would result in:
This is all a paragraph blah blah blah ETC

Freshenstein

@Pierre-Åberg
That just made the entire document as one giant line, which is not what I asked for. I need it to make each paragraph a single line.

PeterJones

@Freshenstein ,

If I start with:

This is all a paragraph
blah blah blah
ETC

This is a second paragraph
blah
and this ends the second paragraph

FIND WHAT = (?<!\r\n)\r\n(?!\r\n)
REPLACE WITH = space character
SEARCH MODE = regular expression
REPLACE ALL

This finds newline sequences (\r\n = CRLF = carriage return + line feed = standard Windows end-of-line) that don’t have a newline sequence before ((?<!\r\n) means “look behind for not CRLF”) and don’t have a newline sequence after ((?!\r\n) means “look ahead for not CRLF”) and replaces them with a space.

=> then I end up with:

This is all a paragraph blah blah blah ETC

This is a second paragraph blah and this ends the second paragraph

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Freshenstein

That is EXACTLY what I was wanting. Thanks so much!