Regex to remove white spaces, blank lines and final line break in Javascript

Question

Ok guys, I\'m having a hard time with regex..

Here\'s what I need... get a text file, remove all blank lines and white spaces in the beginning and end of these lines

Answer 1

Since it sounds like you have to do this all in a single regex, try this:

quotes.replace(/^(?=\n)$|^\s*|\s*$|\n\n+/gm,"")

What we are doing is creating a group that captures nothing, but prevents a newline by itself from getting consumed.

Answer 2

Split, replace, filter:

quotes.split('\n')
    .map(function(s) { return s.replace(/^\s*|\s*$/g, ""); })
    .filter(function(x) { return x; });

With input value " hello \n\nfoo \n bar\nworld \n", the output is ["hello", "foo", "bar", "world"].