CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershellbatch-file
Mark Deven
Mark Deven

Reputation: 579

Removing blank lines from text file using batch

Recently this question was posted on stackoverflow, I have a similar problem as J. Williams except I only need to remove empty lines (removing spaces would not hurt the program though, it just isn't necessary). When I tried his original as well as the solution compo gave it only cleared the file instead of removing extra lines. I'm using it by itself in a batch file.

Example: I need this:

Joe
Bob
Mark
Frank

Dutch
(blank line here too)

to become this:

Joe
Bob
Mark
Frank
Dutch

I'm open to attaching such a solution to this powershell script too, as it is what is giving me the blank lines: (Get-Content friends.txt) | Where-Object {$_ -notmatch "\bJoe\b"} | Set-Content friends.txt Thank's for your help.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 7414

Answers (3)

BenH
BenH

Reputation: 10034

Another PowerShell method would be to use the Select-String cmdlet using the regex pattern .+ which means one or more of any character. Also if using Set-Content be sure to use the -NoNewLine parameter to prevent the unwanted blank line at the end. (Requires PS5+)

(Select-String -Path C:\example.txt -Pattern '.+' |
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty line) -join [Environment]::NewLine |
    Set-Content C:\exampleoutput.txt -NoNewline

Upvotes: 0

Bryce McDonald
Bryce McDonald

Reputation: 1870

This should work for you - in short, it reads all the lines of the file, then writes back only the lines with something in it to the file.

$friends = Get-Content friends.txt
$friends | Where-Object { $_ } | Set-Content friends.txt

Upvotes: 4

mjolinor
mjolinor

Reputation: 68243

If it's a relatively small file:

(Get-Content $infile) -match '\S' | Set-Content $infile

If it's too large to read into memory all at once:

Get-Content $infile -ReadCount 1000 |
 ForeachObject {
  $_ -match '\S' |
  Add-Content $outfile
 }

Upvotes: 3

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