Findstr for blank lines

[MrKnowItAllxx]

I'm simply trying to find a findstr command expression that will echo back all blank lines of the file with their line number (including lines that consist of all nonvisible characters)

So far I have:

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findstr /n /v /r "^." "file.txt"

But this will not echo back a line that has spaces in it, but no visible characters

Any help appreciated

[Ed Dyreen]

'
That will echo back all blank lines of the file with their line number, use regular expressions for the nonvisible.

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@echo off &setlocal enableDelayedExpansion

> "out.txt" (

   echo.line1
   echo.
   echo.line3
)

for /f "tokens=1-2 delims=[]" %%a in (

   '2^>nul ^( ^< "out.txt" find /n /v "." ^)'

) do    echo.%%b|>nul findstr /v "." &&(

   echo.
   echo.$c: '%%a'
   echo.$$: '%%b'
)

pause
exit

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$c: '2'
$$: ''
Druk op een toets om door te gaan. . .

[MrKnowItAllxx]

use regular expressions for the nonvisible

How would you do that?

I have tried things like

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findstr /n /r "^[\ ]*" file.txt

but I can't seem to get them to work

[Ed Dyreen]

'
As dBenham explained, be careful with special chars need special handling !
viewtopic.php?p=17275#p17275

Which non-visible variables are u talking about <space>,<tab> ?

[dbenham]

My first thought is to search for strings that contain 0 or more tabs or spaces with nothing else. Note that my character set is supposed to consist of space and tab, but I can't enter tab into this forum, so I put 2 spaces.

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findstr /n /r /c:"^[  ]*$" test.txt

But the above will not work if the last line is blank and does not end with a line feed character. The $ metacharacter only matches lines that end with a line feed.

The trick is to look for lines that do not match a regex that matches any character other than space or tab. The character set is a "not" set containing a space and a tab (again, I can't enter the tab here).

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findstr /n /r /v /c:"[^  ]" test.txt

Dave Benham

[MrKnowItAllxx]

findstr /n /r /v /c:"[^ ]" test.txt

Works perfectly! I need to keep working on this findstr stuff, idk why it seems to confuse me so

Thanks for the help guys