CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sedawk
keppy
keppy

Reputation: 3

command line method to remove single line paragraphs from text file

I have a .txt file with two types of paragraphs:

Some statements and numbers (02) and such followed by a return
With some more stuff followed by two returns

Then a single line paragraph that is followed by two returns

Along with some more double line text return
some more text.

I want to remove all single line paragraphs from the text file. So that the result is:

Some statements and numbers (02) and such followed by a return
With some more stuff followed by two returns

Along with some more double line text return
some more text

I have been attempting to do this with sed and awk, but I keep running into problems coming up with a regex that will look for a newline followed by some characters and ending in two consecutive newlines \n\n.

Is there anyway way to do this with a one liner or am I going to have to write a script to read in line by line and determine the length of the paragraph and strip it out that way?

Thanks.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 707

Answers (2)

kev
kev

Reputation: 161834

awk -F '\n' -v RS='' -v ORS='\n\n' 'NF>1' input.txt
  • When RS is set to the empty string, each record always ends at the first blank line encountered.
  • When RS is set to the empty string, and FS is set to a single character, the newline character always acts as a field separator.

[read more]

Upvotes: 1

glenn jackman
glenn jackman

Reputation: 247012

I tend to reach for Perl for paragraph-oriented parsing:

perl -00 -lne 'print if tr/\n/\n/ > 0'

Upvotes: 1

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