remove empty lines from text file with PowerShell

Question

I know that I can use:

gc c:\\FileWithEmptyLines.txt | where {$_ -ne \"\"} > c:\\FileWithNoEmptyLines.txt

to remove empty lines. But How

Answer 1

This will remove empty lines or lines with only whitespace characters (tabs/spaces).

[IO.File]::ReadAllText("FileWithEmptyLines.txt") -replace '\s+\r\n+', "`r`n" | Out-File "c:\FileWithNoEmptyLines.txt"

Answer 2

This piece of code from Randy Skretka is working fine for me, but I had the problem, that I still had a newline at the end of the file.

(gc file.txt) | ? {$_.trim() -ne "" } | set-content file.txt

So I added finally this:

$content = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllText("file.txt")
$content = $content.Trim()
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllText("file.txt", $content)

Answer 3

You can use -match instead -eq if you also want to exclude files that only contain whitespace characters:

@(gc c:\FileWithEmptyLines.txt) -match '\S'  | out-file c:\FileWithNoEmptyLines

Answer 4

Not specifically using -replace, but you get the same effect parsing the content using -notmatch and regex.

(get-content 'c:\FileWithEmptyLines.txt') -notmatch '^\s*$' > c:\FileWithNoEmptyLines.txt

Answer 5

If you actually want to filter blank lines from a file then you may try this:

(gc $source_file).Trim() | ? {$_.Length -gt 0}