[Info-vax] Removing blank lines from text files

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-06-22 09:35:00 +0000, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply said:

> Right, but the subject is "Removing blank lines from text files".

"Trying to clean up text scraped off a web site that doesn't offer a 
nice download option" is usually easier using a language such as Perl 
and particularly with the use of an available web-scraping framework.

There are available, debugged, and flexible frameworks and tools for this task.

With the previously-cited scraping framework or with another similar 
framework, it's feasible to target specific page text and just the data 
of interest.  Without having to deal with all the baggage involved.  
With what is usually an easier time when the page source gets reworked, 
too.  The scraping framework also avoids having to deal with lines 
containing no text and no whitespace from DCL, too.

But whatever works for y'all.  If DCL and Fortran are all you know, 
you'll likely have a little "fun" with this effort.  Potentially also 
with TLS and the networking too, but I'd assume that this project is 
probably already using curl or similar for that.


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