Remove line returns from within a paragraph but not between paragraphs

[Gavin Brooks]

I have a lot of text that has been copied from a PDF, that I need to make into text files for research purposes. When the text copied over, there was a hard line return at the end of every sentences, and a blank space between paragraphs. I need to the lines within the paragraph joined but the paragraphs to remain separate and am looking for a regex to do that:

For example, the text looks like this:

This is the 1st paragraph. 

With a few lines that

need connected.

This is another paragraph with

a blank line between

it and the previous paragraph.

I want it to look like this:

This is the 1st paragraph. With a few lines that need connected.

This is another paragraph with a blank line between it and the previous paragraph.

The best that I have been able to come up with is this:

([^\r\n])\R(?=[^\r\n])

But that will also remove the last character of each line, so I get this:

This is the 1st paragraph With a few lines tha need connected.

This is another paragraph wit a blank line betwee it and the previous paragraph.

Any suggestions about how to rewrite the above so that it does not remove the final character?

Gavin

[jj]

Hi Gavin,

You could use a capture instead of a positive lookahead assertion and skip the trailing whitespaces.

Find: (\S)\h*\R(\S)

Replace: \1 \2

HTH,

Jean Jourdain

[Roger Moffat]

When I need to sort something like this I don’t use GREP since I’m not familiar enough with it to get it right with little effort, but you can use the basic Find and Replace

Find

\r \r (there’s a space between them because you said there was a space between the paragraphs. If you just meant there was an empty line, use \r\r)

Replace with

xxxxxxx

This preserves the gap between paragraphs as xxxxxxx, and now you have a whole bunch of lines ending in a return

Then find

\r

replace with

“ “ (a single space)

Then Find

xxxxxxx

Replace with

\r\r

Will separate out all the paragraphs again with a blank line between them. Then in case you’ve ended up with 2 spaces anywhere

Find “two spaces” (means 2 spaces, not the words in quotes)

Replace with “one space” (same as above - a single space, not the two words)

Roger

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[Arasmus]

And if you are going to need to do it a lot, you can create a text filter that strings the three steps together. 

[Gavin Brooks]

Hello Jean,

Thanks - that worked perfectly.

Gavin

[Gavin Brooks]

Hello Roger,

Thank you very much for the suggestion. I had thought about doing it this way as well, but I have a lot of files to go through and wanted to see if I could find a way to work things out that didn't involve running find and replace on each file twice. Jean's suggestion worked perfectly. 

Thanks again for the suggestion - I appreciate the help.

Gavin

[Jeffrey Jones]

On 2021 Nov 2, at 23:04, Gavin Brooks <gavin...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a lot of text that has been copied from a PDF, that I need to make into text files for research purposes. When the text copied over, there was a hard line return at the end of every sentences, and a blank space between paragraphs. I need to the lines within the paragraph joined but the paragraphs to remain separate and am looking for a regex to do that:

I am surprised to see so much discussion of Find & Replace options, but no one has mentioned that there is a built-in command that does exactly what you ask:

Text > Remove Line Breaks

It works perfectly on your example text.

[jj]

Text > Remove Line Breaks is indeed a very useful command. Thanks Jeffrey for pointing to it.

But Remove Line Breaks doesn't make a distinction between left aligned text and indented text as the proposed regular expression find/replace does.

In most cases, you want indented text to be left untouched.

Try both solutions on this snippet of text and look at the resulting Code example section :

--

This is some long wrapped text line, 

that is followed by some indented section.

    

    Code example:

    

    A = "a"; // A Comment.

    B = "b";

    

This is another wrapped paragraph with more text, 

blablabla, blablabla, blablabla ...

--

Jean