How to Remove All Lines from a Text File Starting at First Empty Line

How to remove all lines from a text file starting at first empty line?

With AWK:

$ awk '/^$/{exit} 1' test.txt > output.txt

Contents of output.txt

$ cat output.txt 
ABC
DEF

Walkthrough: For lines that matches ^$ (start-of-line, end-of-line), exit (the whole script). For all lines, print the whole line -- of course, we won't get to this part after a line has made us exit.

Delete lines of text until new blank line reached

You can use awk and test for 0 fields. (it will also work if line has just spaces or tab, count as blank)

awk 't;NF==0 {t=1}' file
Line 3
Line 4
Line 5

t; print line if its true

NF==0 test for number of fields=0

If 0 fields, set t=1

Can be shorten some:

awk 't;!NF{t=1}' file

Removing all lines after blank line with sed and awk

You can do this fairly easily with awk

awk '/^$/{exit}1' ./input/file

Remove everything starting from the first blank line in a text file

This should work:

awk '/^$/ {exit}{print}' < data

Sample input:

one two thre
four five six
seven

eight nine ten
eleven twelve
thirteen

fourteen fifteen
THE END

Sample output:

# awk '/^$/ {exit}{print}' < data
one two thre
four five six
seven

BTW, If your "blank lines" could include spaces and/or tabs, use:

'/^[ \t]*$/ {exit}{print}'

Delete first line of file if it's empty

The simplest thing in sed is:

sed '1{/^$/d}'

Note that this does not delete a line that contains all blanks, but only a line that contains nothing but a single newline. To get rid of blanks:

sed '1{/^ *$/d}'

and to eliminate all whitespace:

sed '1{/^[[:space:]]*$/d}'

remove all empty lines from text files while keeping format


  • Ctrl+H
  • Find what: \R^$
  • Replace with: LEAVE EMPTY
  • check Wrap around
  • check Regular expression
  • Replace all

Explanation:

\R      : any kind of linebreak
^ : begining of line
$ : end of line

Result for given example:

apples
oranges
peaches

Remove first empty line from a file

Have you considered adding a Trim before the Replace - like this:

$FileContent = $FileContent.Trim().Replace(" ","")

Trim removes leading and trailing white space. There is also a TrimStart and TrimEnd if you only want to remove one or the other.

Regex remove first empty line

You need to remove all line breaks from the start of the string first.

The /[\r\n]+$/mg will remove all line breaks, but it stops before the last end of line char of a line break char streak, so all the initial empty lines but the last are removed.

So, in a PCRE (as well as .NET, Java, Python re, Ruby) pattern, you may use

\A[\r\n]+|[\r\n]+$

See the regex demo, use it with multiline and global flag in the regex101 tester.

Details

  • \A[\r\n]+ - start of string and the 1+ CR or/and LF symbols, as many as possible
  • | - or
  • [\r\n]+$ - 1+ CR/LF symbols, as many as possible, followed with a line break or end of string.

How to delete all blank lines in the file with the help of python?


import fileinput
for line in fileinput.FileInput("file",inplace=1):
if line.rstrip():
print line

Remove empty lines in file with VSCode but only at the start and end of file

For empty lines at the end, you can remove them with \n+$(?![\r\n]) in VSCode.

For the first empty lines should work (?) (?<!(.|\n))\n+.

Other flavours of regex have (although they don't seem to work in VSCode) have \A or \` and \Z \' for start and end of file.



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