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!

Recent Features

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

  • By
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Parallax Sound Waves Animating on Scroll

    Scrolling animations are fun. They are fun to create and fun to use. If you are tired of bootstrapping you might find playing with scrolling animations as a nice juicy refreshment in your dry front-end development career. Let's have a look how to create animating...

  • By
    jQuery Comment Preview

    I released a MooTools comment preview script yesterday and got numerous requests for a jQuery version. Ask and you shall receive! I'll use the exact same CSS and HTML as yesterday. The XHTML The CSS The jQuery JavaScript On the keypress and blur events, we validate and...

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!