Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Remove Multiple New Lines with JavaScript

By  on  

I'm blessed in that lots of people want to guest post on this blog.  It's really flattering and I love seeing writers get a bunch of attention after writing.  My task is converting the blog post, in whatever format it's provided in (HTML, Markdown, PDF, Google Doc, etc.), to HTML for my blog, which can sometimes get messy.  I employ a host of regular expressions to fix these formatting issues.  And the number one problem?  Loads of extra new lines (\n).

The Regular Expression

The regular expression is actually quite simple:

content.replace(/[\r\n]+/g, '\n'); // Just one new line

content.replace(/[\r\n]+/g, '\n\n'); // "document" formatting, more elegant

With the dozens of extra lines gone it's much easier to work with the content!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript

    If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been working on a super top secret mobile application using Appcelerator Titanium.  The experience has been great:  using JavaScript to create easy to write, easy to test, native mobile apps has been fun.  My...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    HTML5’s placeholder Attribute

    HTML5 has introduced many features to the browser;  some HTML-based, some in the form of JavaScript APIs, but all of them useful.  One of my favorites if the introduction of the placeholder attribute to INPUT elements.  The placeholder attribute shows text in a field until the...

  • By
    Comment Preview Using MooTools

    Comment previewing is an awesome addition to any blog. I've seen really simple comment previewing and some really complex comment previewing. The following is a tutorial on creating very basic comment previewing using MooTools. The XHTML You can set up your XHTML any way you'd like.

Discussion

  1. Adam van den Hoven

    David,

    I’m more inclined to use something like:

    content.replace(/[\r\n]\s*/g, '\n'); // Just one new line
content.replace(/[\r\n]\s*/g, '\n\n'); // "document" formatting, more elegant

    Only there always seems to be some extra whitespace between those newlines. If you don’t want to loose the tabs on the next line then this works just as well

    content.replace(/[\r\n]\s*[\r\n]/g, '\n'); // Just one new line
content.replace(/[\r\n]\s*[\r\n]/g, '\n\n'); // "document" formatting, more elegant

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!