Select and Delete 2 lines after each blank line

[Ziad El Hachem]

Dear all,

I have large amounts of text that can be seen as the following pattern:

Good Line
(empty line)


Bad Line
Bad Line
Good Line
(empty line)
Bad Line
Bad Line

Etc...
I would really like to delete all blank lines along with the next 2 bad lines. I only know this is possible in VBA! but I am not proficient in it (my experience is with excel VBA)

[slaycock]

Can you describe what the good and bad lines look like a little better.

[macropod]

Originally Posted by Ziad El Hachem

I would really like to delete all blank lines along with the next 2 bad lines. I only know this is possible in VBA!

You almost certainly don't need VBA for this; a wildcard Find/Replace would most likely do the job, where:
Find = ([^13^l])[^13^l]{1,}
Replace = \1
This assumes there are no stray spaces, tabs, etc. in your 'blank' lines.

[Ziad El Hachem]

what does ^| do?
the find search, even using wildcards is not working...

A sample of the texts I am trying to arrange (standard youtube caption files):

1
00:00:04,350 --> 00:00:07,609
This tutorial will show how to seamlessly transfer

2
00:00:07,609 --> 00:00:11,059
a model from Revit structure to ETABS

3
00:00:11,059 --> 00:00:14,559
at then back again to Revit using

[macropod]

Originally Posted by Ziad El Hachem

what does ^| do?

Nothing that I'm aware of - it's not in the expression I posted... ^l is not ^|. ^l is a manual line break.

Originally Posted by Ziad El Hachem

the find search, even using wildcards is not working...

It might if you used the actual Find expression I posted! If not, the spacing may simply reflect your paragraph space before/after settings, which no amount of Find/Replace could fix. If you attach an actual document to a post, with some representative data, we could provide more advice. You can do that via the paperclip symbol on the 'Go Advanced' tab at the bottom of this screen.