How to reformat “gq”ed text in one line per paragraph format in Vim

Question

I have some text files previously formatted in vim using \"gggqG\". Now I need to convert them to one line per paragraph format. I saw a way(using :g command) to do that before,

Answer 1

There are two approaches I know of:

• Set textwidth to something big and reformat:

  :set tw=1000000
  gggqG
  

• Use substitute (this is more appropriate if you want to do it in a mapping):

  :%s/.\zs\n\ze./ /
  

Explanation of the latter:

:%s        " Search and replace across the whole file
/          " Delimiter
.\zs\n\ze. " Look for a character either side of a new-line (so ignore blank lines).
           " The \zs and \ze make the replacement only replace the new-line character.
/ /        " Delimiters and replace the new-line with a space.