Delete blank lines with flush-lines

Sometimes after I copy-paste code snippets from web page into emacs buffer I get text with superfluous blank lines delimiting code.

Marking region and running M-x flush-lines RET ^$ RET quickly makes it better by removing those pesky blank lines. This is, of course, makes sense only if pasted code doesn’t contain blank lines you want to preserve.

Update:
You may need to use something more complex than simple ^$ (something like ^\W*$ as regexp) if “blank” line contains some whitespace characters.

Example before:

-export([test1/0,

         test2/0,

         test3/0,

         double/1]).

After marking region and applying M-x flush-lines RET ^\W*$ RET (in your case just ^$ may be sufficient):

-export([test1/0,
         test2/0,
         test3/0,
         double/1]).

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 1:12 am and is filed under emacs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Delete blank lines with flush-lines”

  1. hober says:
    October 22, 2007 at 6:31 pm

    There’s also M-x delete-blank-lines RET.

    Reply
  2. Ruslan Spivak says:
    October 22, 2007 at 7:34 pm

    Yes, that one is useful on its own. It’s just that M-x flush-lines RET ^$ RET will work on region like:
    text1
    _blank_line_
    text2
    _blank_line_
    text3

    producing:
    text1
    text2
    text3

    while C-x C-o works only on consequent blank lines.

    Reply
  3. Jesper says:
    February 20, 2008 at 9:04 am

    Give M-x delete-trailing-whitespace RET a go too ;)

    Reply

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