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replacing two EOL chars by one

Jürgen Exner jurgenex at hotmail.com
Sat Dec 20 16:18:41 EST 2003 
Xah Lee wrote:
> i have a bunch of java files that has spaced-out formatting that i
> want to get rid of. I want to replace two end of line characters by
> one end of line characters. The files in question is unix, and i'm
> also working under unix, so i did:
>
>  perl -pi'*~' -e "s@\n\n@\n at g" *.java
>
> but this to no avail.
>
> after many minutes of checking and rechecking and lots of trial and
> error with frustration, i realized that the fucking perl to my
> expectations again cannot do this simple fucking thing. Nor can the
> unix utility tr. Fucking stupid perl couldn't do a simple task of
> replacing strings.
>
> let me just take this opportunity to explain one shit from the
> thousands from perldoc.
[rest of rant snipped]

Five seconds of thinking might have spared you from embarassing yourself
like that (and is certainly more effective than 5 paragraphs of swearing).
You are reading the file line by line. And with each line you are looking
for two consecutive newlines.
Now, how can a single line contain two newlines?

jue
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