CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexvisual-studio-2012
Krishna Sarma
Krishna Sarma

Reputation: 1860

Remove trailing spaces in visual studio 2012

I want to remove trailing spaces of each line from a text file, keeping the line breaks intact. I am using Visual studio 2012's Regex feature for this.

When I am trying to find \s*\r?\n and replace with \r\n it is also stripping out all the empty lines, which is not expected.

Is there anything that I am missing?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2223

Answers (3)

user1464603
user1464603

Reputation: 457

I know this is old but i use the search and replace with regex of Visual Studio with this string (no quotes) " +\r?$" and leave the replace field empty then just do replace all. This preserves the line breaks and works for the VS regex flavor.

Upvotes: 2

Alan Moore
Alan Moore

Reputation: 75232

Set subtraction to the rescue!

[\s-[\n]]+\n

...or any whitespace character (\s) except (-) linefeed ([\n]). Ordinarily, - is treated as either a range operator or a literal hyphen (depending on its position within the character class), and [ is treated as a literal bracket. But if the hyphen is followed by something that looks like a character class, it becomes a set subtraction operator.

ref: Character Classes in Regular Expressions

Upvotes: 8

Ibrahim Najjar
Ibrahim Najjar

Reputation: 19423

Why are you trying to match the carriage return \r and newline \n if you don't want them replaced and then replace everything with \r\n.

Instead match only the spaces and tabs and any other whitespace character that you want stripped and replace that with the empty string like this:

[ \t]*$

This will match zero or more spaces or tabs at the end of each line and replace them with the empty string.

NOTE: You will have to use multi-line mode so $ matches at the end of every line.

If you can't activate multi-line mode in VS then you can use another expression that doesn't need that:

[ \t]*(?=\r?\n)

This will match zero or more tabs and spaces as long as they are followed by an optional carriage return then a newline or in other words, as long as they are at the end of line.

Upvotes: 3

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