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Avoid the single quote in the comment so that the single quoted string does not unexpectedly end when the code is used without first stripping out the comments.

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edit approved Feb 5, 2011 at 4:54

Chris Johnsen

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Use Awk or Perl's paragraph mode to process a file paragraph by paragraph, where paragraphs are separated by blank lines.

awk -vRS= '
  NR!=1 {print ""}      # print blank line before every record but the first
  {                     # do this for every record (i.e. paragraph):
    gsub(" *\n *"," "); # replace newlines by spaces, compressing spaces
    sub(" *$","");      # remove spaces at the end of the paragraph
    print
  }
'
perl -000 -pe '             # for every paragraph:
  print "\n" unless $.==1;  # print a blank line, except before the first paragraph
  s/ *\n *(?!$)/ /g;        # replace newlines by spaces, compressing spaces, but not at the end of the paragraph
  s/ *\n+\z/\n/             # normalize the paragraph's last line end of the paragraph
'

Of course, since this doesn't parse the (La)TeX, it will horribly mutilate comments, verbatim environments and other special-syntax. You may want to look into DeTeX or other (La)TeX-to-text converters.

Use Awk or Perl's paragraph mode to process a file paragraph by paragraph, where paragraphs are separated by blank lines.

awk -vRS= '
  NR!=1 {print ""}      # print blank line before every record but the first
  {                     # do this for every record (i.e. paragraph):
    gsub(" *\n *"," "); # replace newlines by spaces, compressing spaces
    sub(" *$","");      # remove spaces at the end of the paragraph
    print
  }
'
perl -000 -pe '             # for every paragraph:
  print "\n" unless $.==1;  # print a blank line, except before the first paragraph
  s/ *\n *(?!$)/ /g;        # replace newlines by spaces, compressing spaces, but not at the end of the paragraph
  s/ *\n+\z/\n/             # normalize the paragraph's last line end
'

Use Awk or Perl's paragraph mode to process a file paragraph by paragraph, where paragraphs are separated by blank lines.

awk -vRS= '
  NR!=1 {print ""}      # print blank line before every record but the first
  {                     # do this for every record (i.e. paragraph):
    gsub(" *\n *"," "); # replace newlines by spaces, compressing spaces
    sub(" *$","");      # remove spaces at the end of the paragraph
    print
  }
'
perl -000 -pe '             # for every paragraph:
  print "\n" unless $.==1;  # print a blank line, except before the first paragraph
  s/ *\n *(?!$)/ /g;        # replace newlines by spaces, compressing spaces, but not at the end of the paragraph
  s/ *\n+\z/\n/             # normalize the last line end of the paragraph
'

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answered Feb 4, 2011 at 23:21

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

865.3k
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1.8k
2.3k

Use Awk or Perl's paragraph mode to process a file paragraph by paragraph, where paragraphs are separated by blank lines.

awk -vRS= '
  NR!=1 {print ""}      # print blank line before every record but the first
  {                     # do this for every record (i.e. paragraph):
    gsub(" *\n *"," "); # replace newlines by spaces, compressing spaces
    sub(" *$","");      # remove spaces at the end of the paragraph
    print
  }
'
perl -000 -pe '             # for every paragraph:
  print "\n" unless $.==1;  # print a blank line, except before the first paragraph
  s/ *\n *(?!$)/ /g;        # replace newlines by spaces, compressing spaces, but not at the end of the paragraph
  s/ *\n+\z/\n/             # normalize the paragraph's last line end
'