What's an easy way to convert a multi-line comment (e.g. JSDoc with each line separated by line breaks) into a paragraph without any line breaks that I can copy into an email or another document?
I know I can use search & replace with regular expressions, but is there a more ergonomic way to do it?
You probably knew that you can use multiple cursors to change multiple lines at once, but did you know you can also use them to remove line breaks? Assume you start with this comment:
/**
* Returns a new `Temporal.LocalDateTime` instance representing the first
* valid time during the current calendar day and time zone of `this`.
*
* The local time of the result is almost always `00:00`, but in rare cases it
* could be a later time e.g. if DST starts at midnight in a time zone. For
* example:
* ```
* const ldt = Temporal.LocalDateTime.from('2015-10-18T12:00-02:00[America/Sao_Paulo]');
* ldt.startOfDay; // => 2015-10-18T01:00-02:00[America/Sao_Paulo]
* ```
*/
First part: use multiple cursors to remove the prefix characters on each line.
Click on the upper-left corner of the comment (the /**).
Now hold down Cmd+Shift (Alt+Shift on PC) and click after the */ on the last line of the comment section.
This will create a columnar, multi-line selection that includes the non-text prefix characters on each line. If the selection doesn't include all the prefix characters, you can hold down the Shift key and use the left or right arrow keys to adjust the width of the selection.
Press the Delete key to remove prefix characters on all lines.
Second part: it's time to delete the line breaks and replace them with spaces. I discovered today that you can use multiple cursors for this part too!
After you've deleted the prefix text above, but before you've pressed any other keys, press the backspace key. It will delete the line breaks but leave each cursor in the same place!
Type the spacebar once to insert one space to replace each line break.
Press ESC to clear multiple selections, and delete the extra space at the start of the line. You may have an extra space(s) at the end of the line too that may need trimming.
Copy the resulting one-line text.
Use Cmd+Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows) to undo the last few changes so your code comment will be back to normal.
Now you can paste the copied text into an email!
The same solution works to replace line breaks with spaces in any multi-line text, not only code comments.
I'm sure that many of you already knew how to do this trick, but I found it so easy and so cool that I thought it was worth sharing as a Q&A here so others can learn about this trick too.
Here's what the steps look like in the VSCode IDE:
Before deleting, you should see something like this:
After deleting prefix characters:
After deleting line breaks (note the multiple cursors are still there):
After inserting spaces in place of the deleted line breaks:
I usually select the first line break, then hit/hold command+D repeatedly to add cursors at all line endings I want to edit. Then, just hit space once.
my code and the terminal .
file = "ex25.py", line 27
words=sort_sentence(sentence)
IndentationError: unindent does not match any other indentation level
The code I wrote in ex25 is:
def print_first_and_last_sorted(sentence):
words =sort_sentence(sentence)
print_first_word(words)
print_last_word(words)
After you define function with the first line, in the second line you need to use proper indentation or spaces. The standard is 4 spaces (4 space keystrokes) or 1 tab.
def print_first_and_last_sorted(sentence):
words =sort_sentence(sentence) # This line and next should be spaced 4 times with
print_first_word(words) # respect to the above one
print_last_word(words)
Your second line is not indented properly. You can compare it with the next lines. They all should be vertically parallel at their start points.
I can't comment but from both the edit and the original post, therefore I can't tell what the indentation actually is.
Python indentation works like blocks of code, similar to other languages except without the curly braces. For example:
def print_first_and_last_sorted(sentence):
words = sort_sentence(sentence)
print_first_word(words)
print_last_word(words)
You may have mixed up spaces & tabs. From this answer, try searching and replacing to replace them with a few spaces.
I have a csv file that has random line breaks throughout the file. (probably load errors when the file was created where the loader somehow managed to put a carriage return into the field)
How do I go in and remove all carriage returns / line breaks where the last character is not "
I have word and sublime text available for text editors
I have tried ^p with a letter infront and find and replace, but that doesnt seem to work for some of the lines for some reason
Example
"3203","Shelving Units
",".033"
instead of
"3203","Shelving Units",".033"
and
"3206","Broom
","1.00"
instead of
"3206","Broom","1.00"
Menu > Find > Replace... or Ctrl+H
Select "Regular Expression" (probably a .* icon in the bottom left, depending on your theme).
Use \n to select newlines (LF) or \r\n (CRLF).
As #GerardRoche said you can use search and replace in Sublime Text. Open it via ctrl+h and press alt+r to toggle regex to enable it. (You may want to create a backup of your file before doing such changes.)
Search for (?<=[^"\n])\n+ and replace it with nothing, press Replace All or ctrl+alt+enter to replace it.
The regex just mean: search for alt least one (+) newlines (\n), that are preceded by something different than a quotation mark or a newline (?<=[^"\n]).
You don't need to worry about carriage returns, because ST only uses them when reading and writing the file and not in the editor.
When using Emacs's text mode, I find it handy to use the default indentation method with below features:
When I am at some indentation level, hitting C-j
will automatically bring me to the next line with identical
indentation level
When I hit Tab, the indentation will further right by some amount (usually to align with the next word in previous line)
However, I find it difficult to go back by one indentation level. E.g. If the current cursor is at the position of | as below:
Line 0: some text here
Line 1: some text here
Line 2: some text here
|Line 3: some text here
what can I do to bring the cursor to align with "L" in line 1?
Note the amount of spaces of each level indentation is not fixed, as it is usually align to the 2nd word of previous line. So it seems not proper to use reducing 4-spaces as indent to previous level.
Just curious whether there is any predefined / customized function for such purpose. It seems natural to seek for a corresponding "left-indent" command if the text-editor already provides a "right-indent" one.
Suppose you have this file:
x
a
b
c
x
x
a
b
c
x
x
and you want to find the sequence abc (and select the whole 3 lines) with Notepad++ . How to express the newline in regex, please?
Notepad++ can do that comfortably, you don't even need regexes
In the find dialogue box look in the bottom left and switch your search mode to Extended which allows \n etc.
As odds on you're working on a file in windows format you'll be looking for \r\n (carriage return, newline)
a\r\nb\r\nc
Will find the pattern over three lines
Update 18th June 2012
With the new Notepad++ v6, you can indeed search for newlines with regexes. So you can just use
a\r\nb\r\nc
even with regular expressions to accomplish what you want. Note \r\n is Windows encoding of line-breaks. In Unix files, its just \n.
Unfortunately, you can't do that in Notepad++ when using regex search. Notepad++ is based on the Scintilla editor component, which doesn't handle newlines in regex.
You can use extended search for newline searching, but I don't think that will help you search for 3 lines.
More info here.
Update: Robb and StartClass0830 were right about extended search. It does work, but not when using regular expressions search.
^a\x0D\x0Ab\x0D\x0Ac
This will work \x0D is newline and \x0A is carriage return. Assumption is that each line in your file ends with ascii 10 and 13.
I found a workaround for this.
Simply, in Extended mode replace all \r\n to a string that didn't exist in the rest of the document eg. ,,,newline,,, (watch out for special regexp chars like $, &, and *).
Then switch to Regexp mode, do some replacements (now newline is ,,,newline,,,).
Next, switch to Extended mode again and replace all ,,,newline,,, to \r\n.
For Notepad 6 and beyond, do this as a regular expression:
Select Search Mode > Regular expression (w/o . matches newline)
And in the Find what Textbox : a[\r\n]b[\r\n]+c[\r\n]
or if you are looking at the (Windows or Unix) file to see its line breaks as \r\n or \n then you may find it easier to use Extended Mode:
Select Search Mode > Extended (\n, \r, \t, \0, \x...)
And in the Find what Textbox for Windows: a\r\nb\r\nc\r\n
Or in the Find what Textbox for Unix: a\nb\nc\n
Wasn't clear if the OP intent is to select the trailing line return (after the 'c') as well, as would be necessary to remove the lines.
To not select the trailing line return, as appropriate for replacing with a non-empty string, simply remove the final line return from the matching statement.
Note that if there should be a match on the last line of the string, without a matching trailing line return, the match fails.
a\r\nb\r\nc works for me, but not ^a\x0D\x0Ab\x0D\x0Ac
Hmm, too bad that newline is not working with regular expressions. Now I have to go back to Textpad again. :(
Select Search Mode Which is
Extended (\n, \r, \t, \0, \x...)
\n is new line and such
This is Manuel
Find: "(^a.$)\r\n(b.)\r\n^(c.*)$" - pickup 3 whole lines, only storing data
Replace with: "\1\2\3" - Put down (replay) data
Works fine in Regex with Notepad++ v7.9.5
Place holders: ^ Start and $ End of line can be inside or out of ()store as shown, though clearly not necessary in given example. Note "[^x]" is different - here "^" is "NOT".
Advantage of storing and replay allows much more complicated pattern match without having to type in again what you want to end up with, and even change of replay: "\2\3\1" for "bca"
I have run accross this little issue when the document is windows CR/LF
If you click the box for . to match newlines you need .. to match CR/LF so if you have
<blah><blah>",
"<more><blah>
you need to use ",.." to match some string comma cr/lf another string
In Notepad++ you can also try highlighting the desired part of the text and then pressing CTRL+J.
That would justify the text and thus removing all line endings.