Inspiring

Answered

how to remove blank lines

Forum|Forum|27 days ago
August 29, 2026
18 replies
120 views

Hello,

In this example I would like to delete all the blank lines between the lines of text, or after the last line of text. How to do it ?

Correct answer Barb Binder

Hi Pierre:

I use

Find: \s+$

Change: [leave empty]

Regular expressions on

I prefer this because it picks up the pesky extra horizontal spaces at the end of the line, in addition to the extra ¶s.

Barb Binder

Correct answer

Community Expert

Hi Pierre:

I use

Find: \s+$

Change: [leave empty]

Regular expressions on

I prefer this because it picks up the pesky extra horizontal spaces at the end of the line, in addition to the extra ¶s.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Barb, does that work in Perl (the default) or just GREP? I change my settings to GREP since I know it better.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi Dave:

I use this string in InDesign (GREP tab enabled) and in FrameMaker (Regular Expressions enabled) exactly as I demo’d to remove trailing spaces. I don’t change anything for it to work in FrameMaker.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

W

Winfried Reng

Community Expert

Hi,

To really search for empty paragraphs enter this in the Find box: \P\p

Replace with nothing. Leave the Change box empty.

When you search for \p\p and replace with \p, this works as well. Did you really press Find and then Change. Or Change All?

Best regards, Winfried

P

pierret18811376Author

Inspiring

@Winfried Reng

Hi Winfried,

What is working the best is with your solution :

\P\p + nothing in change + “change all” button (one time)

What is the difference between \P\p (on your solution) VS \p\p (on the Dave’s solution) ?

W

Winfried Reng

Community Expert

Explained in the online help in the Appendix, Keyboard shortcuts, Find and Change:

\P Start of paragraph
\p End-of-paragraph symbol
This means:

\P\p is an empty paragraph with nothing between the start and end of the paragraph symbols. However, note that FrameMaker does not count markers or anchors for tables or insets here. These could be accidentally deleted!

\p\p means that there are two paragraph end symbols. In my tests this works as well.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

The first paragraph return will need to be manually deleted.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

P

pierret18811376Author

Inspiring

@Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Thank you Dave for the video. It helped me how to do.

I understand that instead of using the “find” button, you use several times the “change all” button. So I have simply used several times the button “change all” and it worked (without doing anything else).