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How to remove blank lines with Flowfiles

Open the Remove Duplicate Lines tool. In the options bar, uncheck the Keep blank lines toggle (it is on by default). Paste your text — any line that contains only whitespace characters (spaces, tabs) is treated as blank and stripped from the output.

The stats bar below the textareas shows a "Blank removed" counter so you know exactly how many empty lines were stripped. This is separate from the duplicate count.

Where blank lines come from

Blank lines sneak into text data through a variety of sources:

• Copy-paste from web pages — HTML paragraph breaks and spacing elements often produce extra blank lines when pasted as plain text.
• PDF text extraction — PDF to text converters frequently insert blank lines between paragraphs, table rows, or sections.
• Log file aggregation — many logging systems insert blank lines between log blocks or after each session.
• Email client forwarding — pasting an email thread into a text file adds blank lines between quoted sections.
• Spreadsheet exports — empty rows in a spreadsheet become blank lines in a CSV or TXT export.
• Manual editing artifacts — authors accidentally press Enter twice, or leave placeholder lines during editing.

When to keep blank lines

Not every blank line should be removed. There are legitimate cases where blank lines carry structural meaning:

• In Markdown, a blank line separates paragraphs — removing them collapses all text into one block.
• In some configuration formats (INI, TOML), blank lines separate sections and their removal can break parsing.
• In structured data like SQL exports, blank lines can separate INSERT blocks intentionally.
• In poetry or creative writing, blank lines are part of the intended rhythm.

For these cases, leave "Keep blank lines" enabled and use the deduplication feature independently.

Command-line equivalents

If you prefer to work in a terminal, removing blank lines from a file is a one-liner:

• Linux / macOS (sed): sed '/^$/d' input.txt > output.txt
• Linux / macOS (grep): grep -v '^$' input.txt > output.txt
• Linux / macOS (awk): awk 'NF' input.txt > output.txt — also removes lines with only whitespace.
• PowerShell: Get-Content input.txt | Where-Object { $_ -ne "" } | Set-Content output.txt

The browser tool is faster for quick, interactive cleanup without opening a terminal.

Frequently asked questions