# How to remove empty lines in VS Code

> Learn how to remove hundreds of empty lines in VS Code at once using regex find and replace, matching repeated newlines and collapsing them to a single one.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2020-06-17 | Updated: 2020-06-25 | Topics: [Tools](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/tools/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/vscode-remove-empty-lines/

I recently had to work with a file, in VS Code, that had several empty lines I wanted to remove all at once.

We're talking about 700+ empty lines with some text in between, and I didn't want to do this manually.

I'm a programmer, so I'd rather spend 5 minutes making a task easier rather than spend the same amount of time doing an annoying job.

I searched a bit and found this simple way to do so: replace `\n\n` with `\n`.

![Remove empty lines in VS Code](https://flaviocopes.com/images/vscode-remove-empty-lines/Screen_Shot_2020-06-14_at_21.28.14.png)

I ran "replace all" inside the file, and half of the lines were removed. So I ran it again, and again and again, until I got to 1 empty line.

> Update: `\n\n+` will replace all lines at once without having to repeat the operation