How to delete multiple empty lines with SED? - sed

Question

I'm trying to compress a text document by deleting of duplicated empty lines, with sed. This is what I'm doing (to no avail):
sed -i -E 's/\n{3,}/\n/g' file.txt
I understand that it's not correct, according to this manual, but I can't figure out how to do it correctly. Thanks.

Answer 1

I think you want to replace spans of multiple blank lines with a single blank line, even though your example replaces multiple runs of \n with a single \n instead of \n\n. With that in mind, here are two solutions:
sed '/^$/{ :l
N; s/^\n$//; t l
p; d; }' input
In many implementations of sed, that can be all on one line, with the embedded newlines replaced by ;.
awk 't || !/^$/; { t = !/^$/ }'

Answer 2

As tripleee suggested above, I'm using Perl instead of sed:
perl -0777pi -e 's/\n{3,}/\n\n/g'

Answer 3

Use the translate function
tr -s '\n'
the -s or --squeeze-repeats reduces a sequence of repeated character to a single instance.

Answer 4

This is much better handled by tr -s '\n' or cat -s, but if you insist on sed, here's an example from section 4.17 of the GNU sed manual:
#!/usr/bin/sed -f
# on empty lines, join with next
# Note there is a star in the regexp
:x
/^\n*$/ {
N
bx
}
# now, squeeze all '\n', this can be also done by:
# s/^\(\n\)*/\1/
s/\n*/\
/

Answer 5

I am not sure this is what the OP wanted but using the awk solution by William Pursell here is the approach if you want to delete ALL empty lines in the file:
awk '!/^$/' file.txt
Explanation:
The awk pattern
'!/^$/'
is testing whether the current line is consisting only of the beginning of a line (symbolised by '^') and the end of a line (symbolised by '$'), in other words, whether the line is empty.
If this pattern is true awk applies its default and prints the current line.
HTH

Answer 6

I think OP wants to compress empty lines, e.g. where there are 9 consecutive emty lines, he wants to have just three.
I have written a little bash script that does just that:
#! /bin/bash
TOTALLINES="$(cat file.txt|wc -l)"
CURRENTLINE=1
while [ $CURRENTLINE -le $TOTALLINES ]
do
L1=$CURRENTLINE
L2=$(($L1 + 1))
L3=$(($L1 +2))
if [[ $(cat file.txt|head -$L1|tail +$L1) == "" ]]||[[ $(cat file.txt|head -$L1|tail +$L1) == " " ]]
then
L1EMPTY=true
else
L1EMPTY=false
fi
if [[ $(cat file.txt|head -$L2|tail +$L2) == "" ]]||[[ $(cat file.txt|head -$L2|tail +$L2) == " " ]]
then
L2EMPTY=true
else
L2EMPTY=false
fi
if [[ $(cat file.txt|head -$L3|tail +$L3) == "" ]]||[[ $(cat file.txt|head -$L3|tail +$L3) == " " ]]
then
L3EMPTY=true
else
L3EMPTY=false
fi
if [ $L1EMPTY = true ]&&[ $L2EMPTY = true ]&&[ $L3EMPTY = true ]
then
#do not cat line to temp file
echo "Skipping line "$CURRENTLINE
else
echo "$(cat file.txt|head -$CURRENTLINE|tail +$CURRENTLINE)">>temp.txt
echo "Writing line " $CURRENTLINE
fi
((CURRENTLINE++))
done
cat temp.txt>file.txt
rm -r temp.txt
FINALTOTALLINES="$(cat file.txt|wc -l)"
EMPTYLINELINT=$(( $CURRENTLINE - $FINALTOTALLINES ))
echo "Deleted " $EMPTYLINELINT " empty lines."