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I'm currently working on a file that has a lot of duplicate lines splattered across the file and I'm trying to remove those duplicates. I tried using replace-regexp with \(.+^J\)\(\(.+^J\)+?\)\1+ => \1\2 which is working okay. Then I realised that there'll be some lines not caught by that so I captured it in a macro. But now I'm stuck running that several times and not knowing if/when it'll ever be done.

I get the feeling I should be able to use some sort of function to do this but I'm not entirely sure how. What should I be doing instead?

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  • Replace Regexp will work on the region, run mark-whole-buffer before you run it to make sure it covers the whole buffer. I have never seen replace-regexp miss something it should have replaced, if that is really happening it's a bug. Commented Jun 22, 2015 at 13:07
  • @jordonbiondo sometimes a regexp replace will create a new string that matches the original regexp. Eg, search & replace two spaces with one space: if the original has four spaces in a row, the replacement will be two spaces. Silly example, but I occasionally run into similar problems with real regexps. Commented Jun 22, 2015 at 13:15
  • Example: HereIsAFirstRow HereIsASecondRow HereIsAFirstRow HereIsASecondRow Running the regex will create HereIsAFirstRow HereIsASecondRow HereIsASecondRow which can be matched by the regex Commented Jun 22, 2015 at 13:20

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Why not use a simpler function than regex? 

M-x delete-duplicate-lines

is often what I use. It is a function in sort.el.gz. If there is a special reason for keeping/retaining one copy of the duplicate line (say you want to keep the last one but delete all others), then you may want to explore repeatable macros with regex conditions.

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  • Infuriatingly, the copy of emacs that I have at work is 23.3.1 so that function isn't available to me :-( However, I'll mark as accepted. Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 8:48
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You can run a macro endlessly till the first error occurs (like reaching the end of buffer) by passing it a 0 prefix. Using the default keyboard macro binding, that would be M-0 F4.

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