EOL conversion in notepad ++

Question

For some reason, when I open files from a unix server on my windows machine, they occasionally have Macintosh EOL conversion, and when I edit/save them again they don\'t wor

Answer 1

In Notepad++, use replace all with regular expression. This has advantage over conversion command in menu that you can operate on entire folder w/o having to open each file or drag n drop (on several hundred files it will noticeably become slower) plus you can also set filename wildcard filter.

(\r?\n)|(\r\n?)

to

\n

This will match every possible line ending pattern (single \r, \n or \r\n) back to \n. (Or \r\n if you are converting to windows-style)

To operate on multiple files, either:

• Use "Replace All in all opened document" in "Replace" tab. You will have to drag and drop all files into Notepad++ first. It's good that you will have control over which file to operate on but can be slow if there several hundreds or thousands files.
• "Replace in files" in "Find in files" tab, by file filter of you choice, e.g., *.cpp *.cs under one specified directory.

Answer 2

That functionality is already built into Notepad++. From the "Edit" menu, select "EOL Conversion" -> "UNIX/OSX Format".

screenshot of the option for even quicker finding (or different language versions)

You can also set the default EOL in notepad++ via "Settings" -> "Preferences" -> "New Document/Default Directory" then select "Unix/OSX" under the Format box.

Answer 3

Depending on your project, you might want to consider using EditorConfig (https://editorconfig.org/). There's a Notepad++ plugin which will load an .editorconfig where you can specify "lf" as the mandatory line ending.

I've only started using it, but it's nice so far, and open source projects I've worked on have included .editorconfig files for years. The "EOL Conversion" setting isn't changed, so it can be a bit confusing, but if you "View > Show Symbol > Show End of Line", you can see that it's adding LF instead of CRLF, even when "EOL Conversion" and the lower bottom corner shows something else (e.g. Windows (CR LF)).

Answer 4

I open files "directly" from WinSCP which opens the files in Notepad++ I had a php files on my linux server which always opened in Mac format no matter what I did :-(

If I downloaded the file and then opened it from local (windows) it was open as Dos/Windows....hmmm

The solution was to EOL-convert the local file to "UNIX/OSX Format", save it and then upload it.

Now when I open the file directly from the server it's open as "Dos/Windows" :-)