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
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Simple News Scroller Using Dojo

    My journey into Dojo JavaScript has been exciting and I'm continuing to learn more as I port MooTools scripts to Dojo. My latest experiment is porting a simple new scroller from MooTools to Dojo. The code is very similar! The HTML The news items...

  • By
    pointer Media Query

    As more devices emerge and differences in device interaction are implemented, the more important good CSS code will become.  In order to write good CSS, we need some indicator about device capabilities.  We've used CSS media queries thus far, with checks for max-width and pixel ratios.

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!