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Friday, August 06, 2010
CRLF Hack
This is purely for those people who cut/paste things from emails and the like (where a forced hard-return is set after each line) and want to convert it so that that hard-return is removed. This is what I do:
1. find/replace all DOUBLE hard-returns with a weird character (I use ~~~). In my editor, EditPlus, that means setting regular expression on, and replacing \n\n with ~~~.
2. find/replace all SINGLE hard-returns with a space. That means \n becomes _ (where _ is really you hitting the spacebar once). Your whole document is now on one line.
3. find/replace all DOUBLE spaced with a single space. (Just in case step 2 added a space you didn’t want.)
4. find/replace ~~~ with DOUBLE hard-returns (to undo the damage of Step 1).
I figure there’s someone else out there that’s been bothered by this, and who ends up taking care of it manually. Now you have it a different way.
This is a UNIX thing, but here’s how I do it.
Save to a file, then open the file in the vi editor, like so:
vi filename
Then type this in the editor:
:%s/^V^M//g
Where the ^V is Cntl-V and the ^M is Cntl-M
Then type
:w
to save the file. Done.