How to replace multiple newlines in a row with one newline using Ruby

Question

I have a script written in ruby. I need to remove any duplicate newlines (e.g.)

\\n
\\n
\\n

to

\\n

My current

Answer 1

Try This It Worked for me:

s = test\n\n\nbar\n\n\nfooo 

s.gsub("\n\n", '')

Answer 2

Use the more idiomatic String#squeeze instead of gsub.

str = "a\n\n\nb\n\n\n\n\n\nc"
str.squeeze("\n") # => "a\nb\nc"

Answer 3

Simply calling split will also trim out all of your whitespace.

You need to pass \n to split

>> "one   ok \ntwo\n\nthree\n".split(/\n+/).join("\n")
=> "one  ok \ntwo\nthree"

Answer 4

Additionally, also works with

• spaces on blank lines
• n number of back to back blank lines

str.gsub! /\n^\s*\n/, "\n\n"

where,

• \n is of course newline
• \s is space
• denotes 1 or more spaces along when used after \s

Answer 5

Simply splitting and recombining the lines will give the desired result

>> "one\ntwo\n\nthree\n".split.join("\n")
=> "one\ntwo\nthree"

Edit: I just noticed this will replace ALL whitespace substrings with newlines, e.g.

>> "one    two three\n".split.join("\n")
=> "one\ntwo\nthree"

First check that this is what you want!

Answer 6

are you sure it shouldn't be /\n\n\n/, "\n" that what you seem to be wanting in your question above.

also, are you sure it's not doing a windows new-line "\r\n"?

EDIT: Additional info

Per Comment

"The amount of newlines can change. Different lines have between 2 and 5 newlines."

if you only want to hit the 2-5 lines try this

/\n{2,5}/, "\n"