Match newlines that exist only after a line of text (but not between paragraphs)

[ProjectGuru]

Dear group members,  
 
I'm looking for a GREP pattern that can delete the newlines that exist ONLY after some text and NOT newline characters that exist between paragraphs For example:

=================================================

ORIGINAL TEXT:

[Ms. Rowling] This is Ms.
Rowling, author
of the Harry Potter
collection.
And now onto the show.

[intro music]

[John] Hi everyone.
Welcome back to the
Harry Potter podcast.
I'm your co-host John Doe.

DESIRED RESULT:

[Ms. Rowling] This is Ms. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter collection. And now onto the show.

[intro music]

[John] Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Harry Potter podcast. I'm your co-host John Doe.

=================================================

Have been looking around for hours to no avail.

TIA!

[Neil Faiman]

This search pattern will do the trick.

(?s)(?<=\S)\n(?=\S)

Command-F; put it in the Find: box, put a single space in the Replace: box, check Grep, and click Replace All.

Explanation:

• (?s) — the string being searched is the entire document, not individual lines.
• (?<=\S)) — match the search string only when it is preceded by a non-white-space character
• \n — the actual search string: a single newline
• (?=\S) — match the search string only when it is followed by a non-white-space character

When I apply this to your original text, I get:

[Ms. Rowling] This is Ms. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter collection. And now onto the show.

[intro music]

[John] Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Harry Potter podcast. I'm your co-host John Doe.

Cheers,

Neil Faiman

[Johnny Ragadoo]

This appears to be what Text->Remove Line Breaks does in a single click.

But how's this for shorter and sweeter grep-ness. 

In grep mode, search for:

[^$]\n

or shorter yet:

.\n

Either one seems to find newlines at the end of text, but not on a line by themselves. Replacing with a space finishes the task.

But will Text->Remove Line Breaks do the job?

[Johnny Ragadoo]

My post seems to have evaporated. If this turns out to be a duplicate, apologies!

Text->Remove Line Breaks appears to be a built in feature to do what you want. Basically, blocks of text with single line breaks become one long line. Two newlines separate paragraphs. View->Text Display->Soft Wrap Text will then give a pleasant visual layout without modifying the text.

In my first post I suggested some regex patterns that on second glance do not seem to work. Once again, apologies!

On Wednesday, May 31, 2023 at 11:27:27 AM UTC-5 Neil Faiman wrote: