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
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    dat.gui:  Exceptional JavaScript Interface Controller

    We all love trusted JavaScript frameworks like MooTools, jQuery, and Dojo, but there's a big push toward using focused micro-frameworks for smaller purposes. Of course, there are positives and negatives to using them.  Positives include smaller JS footprint (especially good for mobile) and less cruft, negatives...

  • By
    Element Position Swapping Using MooTools 1.2

    We all know that MooTools 1.2 can do some pretty awesome animations. What if we want to quickly make two element swap positions without a lot of fuss? Now you can by implementing a MooTools swap() method. MooTools 1.2 Implementation MooTools 1.2 Usage To call the swap...

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!