Ignoring empty lines counting

Mark Olson

@madara-san
I appreciate your (apparent?) desire to help people, but using generative AI is not the way to do this. StackOverflow has banned people from using ChatGPT, and for good reason.

For example:

For example, in Notepad++, you can go to “View” > “Summary” to see a summary of the document, including the number of lines with and without blank lines.

This is false, the View->Summary tab does not include information on how many lines are empty.

Use a regular expression (regex) to match and replace the blank lines. In most text editors, you can use the find and replace function and search for the regex pattern “^$” (which matches an empty line) and replace it with nothing.

This is almost helpful, except that a quick attempt to actually do the thing you suggested reveals that while the find/replace form finds empty lines, the count feature does not count them. Also, the user doesn’t want to replace empty lines.

Honestly I don’t know why I waste my breath. I’d strongly urge the forum mods to ban this user if they don’t stop wasting people’s time with uncurated crud out of ChatGPT.

Mark Olson

While I’m here, here’s a no-plugin way to get the answer (indirectly):

Go to Find/replace form.
Count the occurrences of the following regex: ^\h*\S+\h*$.

This is the number of lines that don’t have only whitespace.
You can then subtract this number from the number of lines in the document, and that’s how many empty or whitespace-only lines you have.

TBH I think it’s pretty weird that the Count feature doesn’t count empty matches, and this could arguably be considered a bug.

Alan Kilborn

@Mark-Olson said in Ignoring empty lines counting:

I think it’s pretty weird that the Count feature doesn’t count empty matches, and this could arguably be considered a bug.

Mark All also won’t do matches of zero-length (e.g. assert-only matches like ^$), but this perhaps is more understandable since there is no text to “mark”.

Were you going to open a bug report issue about Count?

Mark Olson

@Alan-Kilborn
Not sure if I want to open a bug report, because I can see why this could be considered intended behavior.

I may open one later today.

Mark Olson

@Alan-Kilborn
Actually, I came up with a good solution to the issue of Count not counting empty matches.
Show something like 20 matches (including 10 empty matches)

I’ll create an issue if you haven’t already, and then I’ll start on a PR.

guy038

Hello, @mark-olson, @alan-kilborn and All,

Regarding counting of lines, here are my solutions !

First, insert this dummy text, below, in a new N++ tab

This
is



a

small
test
to
			
      

see if
      this       test   
			is		OK		
That's the
END

Open the Find dialog ( Ctrl + F )
Unchek all box options
Check the Wrap around option
Click on the Count button or use the Alt + T shortcut for all the examples below


So, for one hand :


    ^\R          count ALL lines with NO character ( True EMPTY lines )    =>     5 lines

 +

    ^\h+$        count ALL lines with horizontal BLANK characters ONLY     =>     2 lines

 =

    ^\h*\R       count ALL lines WITHOUT any NON-SPACE character           =>     7 lines

 +

    (?-s)\S.*    count ALL lines with, at LEAST, 1 NON-SPACE character     =>    11 lines    ( as well as  (?-s).*\S )

 =

    (?-s).*\R    count ALL lines                                           =>    18 lines



And for the other hand :


    ^\R           count ALL lines with NO character ( True EMPTY lines )    =>    5 lines

 +

    (?-s).*       count ALL lines with, at LEAST, 1 character               =>   13 lines 

 =

    (?-s).*\R     count ALL lines                                           =>   18 lines

Notes :

Just repeat the counting , using the Mark dialog, to better identify the class of the counted lines !
Of course, you may use a normal selection of text and check the in selection option to restrict the counting to that selection

Best Regards,

guy038

Alan Kilborn

I’ll create an issue if you haven’t already…

The issue that was opened:

https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/13608

guy038

Hi, @mark-olson, @alan-kilborn and All,

Did you notice this fact :

The regex ^$, indeed, does not count true empty lines !

but :

The regex ^\R does count empty lines !!

BR

guy038

Alan Kilborn

@guy038 said in Ignoring empty lines counting:

The regex ^$, indeed, does not count true empty lines !

but :

The regex ^\R does count empty lines !!

If the regex is purely an assertion, e.g. ^$ or \b (to name but two), then its match won’t be counted by Count.

Coises

@Alan-Kilborn said in Ignoring empty lines counting:

@guy038 said in Ignoring empty lines counting:

The regex ^$, indeed, does not count true empty lines !

but :

The regex ^\R does count empty lines !!

If the regex is purely an assertion, e.g. ^$ or \b (to name but two), then its match won’t be counted by Count.

True (since a pure assertion is always an empty match), but empty matches aren’t counted regardless of how the regular expression is specified. In a file that has empty lines, but no lines containing only capital Ws, ^W*$ counts zero matches. ^\R counts all empty lines (except the last line, if it’s empty) because it isn’t an empty match: it matches line ending characters. ^.*$ and ^.+$ both count all lines that are not empty.