Search and replace two consecutive newlines

Question

Running spacemacs 0.200.

I am sorry if it is too basic. But I am just not able to get this.

How do I convert two consecutive newlines with some text, say, 'there were two newlines here'?

I could see the notation for special character classes like [[:alnum:]], etc. But no clue about newlines.

Your question is not clear to me. Do you want to replace all occurrences of `

` with some text? — StarBug, Jun 10 '19 at 14:06
@StarBug No. I want to replace two consecutive newlines with the text '

'. Anyway, I have edited the question to make it more clear. — deshmukh, Jun 10 '19 at 15:28
Interactively, you can use `replace-regexp` for this. Just type `C-q C-j` to indicate a newline in the REGEXP. — StarBug, Jun 10 '19 at 15:53

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 11 '19 at 22:39

3

Interactively, you can use replace-regexp for this. Type C-q C-j to insert a newline character in the minibuffer (so you would need to type this twice).

In Elisp strings you can use \n to indicate a newline, so you would write (re-search-forward "\n\n") to search for two consecutive newlines. You can then use a replace-match command for the replacement.

edited Jun 11 '19 at 22:39

phils

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answered Jun 10 '19 at 17:35

StarBug

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The same should work with `query-replace` instead of `replace-regexp`. – John Palmieri Jun 10 '19 at 17:56
Why doesn't `C-q RET` work? – young_souvlaki Sep 22 '20 at 17:54

Search and replace two consecutive newlines

1 Answers1