deleting lines of code with SciTE Edit Find and Replace

[Coded4Decades]

How can I delete lines using Find and replace?

Here are two examples of what I want to do.

Example 1: 

    To improve readability, I often put 5 or more blank lines before and after chunks of particulary difficult code.

    Before I put the program into production, I want replace 2 or more consecutive blank lines with a single blank line.

    How do I do this?

   

   

Example 2: To debug a program I inserted hundreds of debugging lines. The program now looks like this

$a = $b

$x = $y

Logwrite ("debug info" & $x)

$c = $d

Logwrite ("debug info" & other junk)

etc

etc for about 1000 lines.

The program now works, so I want to remove the LogWrite lines.

I tried using find and replace with regular expressions to DELETE the lines with this pattern.

    ^logwrite(.*$

But, that only BLANKED the lines, it did not delete them.

I also failed with variations of ^logwrite(.*[n]$

And, I tried "transform backslash characters" but that did not help.

Help !

Bob

[BrewManNH]

SciTE's find and find & replace can use a RegEx in the search parameters and references in the replace parameters.

[Melba23]

Coded4Decades,

I have never found SciTE's RegEx replace to be very good - something their developers could improve a lot in my opinion.

I would just write another script to do the job for you - that is what Autoit is good at.

$sScript = FileRead("OrgScript.au3")
$sNewScript = StringRegExpReplace($sScript, "Logwrite.*($|\R)", "")
FileWrite("NewScript.au3", $sNewScript)

Something along those lines works for me.

M23

[BrewManNH]

I just reread the Regex information for SciTE and it wouldn't work anyways, as it can't find CR or LF because it only searches line by line and not the whole text.

[Jos]

The n is not supported in SciTE as indicated in the FAQ.

Only option I can think of is to do it in 2 steps:

1. Replace the text in your regex with something static/unique:
2. Replace the new Static text with Transform selected:

 

Cheers

Jos

[BrewManNH]

This LUA script will replace multiple blank lines with a single blank line and it will leave single blank lines as-is.

function del_empty_lines()
  local txt = editor:GetText()
  if #txt == 0 then return end
  local chg, n = false
  while true do
    txt, n = string.gsub(txt, "(\r?\n\r?\n)%s*\r?\n", "%1")
    if n == 0 then break end
    chg = true
  end
  if chg then
    editor:SetText(txt)
    editor:GotoPos(0)
  end
end

I added this to the Tools.lua file in SciTE, and added the following to the SciteUser.properties file so I can call it using a right click menu in SciTE.

# 46 Remove Empty Lines
# command.name.46.*=Remove Empty Lines
command.46.*=del_empty_lines
command.subsystem.46.*=3
user.context.menu=||Add as Snippet|1116|Remove Empty Lines|1146|

You can uncomment the second line of the above to add the tool to the Tools menu in Scite, and/or comment out/remove the last line to take it off of the right click menu.

 

The LUA script was found here.

[JohnOne]

I done the same as the OP a few years ago, as soon as I had, my script went to crap and I needed them back.

Next time I just left them and replaced "Mydebugfunc(...)" with "; Mydebugfunc(...)" to comment them out.

[Coded4Decades]

all good suggestions.  The one I use was Jos's two step approach which worked great for Example #2.

For example #1 I only needed a one step to change all groups of consecutive blank lines into a single blank line:

 I simply changed rnrnrn  to rnrn  and repeated the find until there were no more replacements.

Thank for your help, that was driving me crazy.

Edited March 22, 2014 by Coded4Decades