Hi Everybody..

I'm a "newbie" to using Command-line... A few half-remembered DOS commands from 30 years ago, and the very handy "Sudo rm -R pathname" REMOVE command...

I do a lot of "cleaning" of plain-text OCR text files. with assorted common
line-break, punctuation and capitalization errors..

IF there's a "recipe book" of simple GREP commands that are "obvious how to use" (for a newbie... :-) I'd love to see it!!! (haven't found it YET!)

Meanwhile, here's the part that's giving me a migraine.. Help, Please!

-----------

I'm having trouble figuring out how to "clean" a text-file of extraneous formatting problems using GREP commands in my "BB-EDIT" (Macintosh) text-program;

I'm trying to clean out a pair of carriage-returns in between a "broken" paragraph (lowercase letter ending para.1, and lowercase letter starting para.2 with NO PUNCTUATION in between, just two line-break \r characters...

My ATTEMPT isn't quite working.
I'm trying to use the GREP command [a-z]\r{2}

to replace the two line-breaks between paragraph1 and paragraph2, (that is, the anchorpoint is the LAST l/c character of the FIRST part of the broken-paragraph)
-----without affecting the end or start letters of the two paragraphs....


THIS GREP STRING **IS** finding the EXACTLY TWO carriage returns PRECEEDED BY a l.c. letter [a-z]

But it is *NOT* "remembering" that PRECEEDING lower-case letter....

So, "Mary had a little lamb

who had snowy green fleece....

is being replaced with "Mary had a little lam who had snowy green fleece.....

Does anybody have such a GREP pattern (and a simple explanation of it, if possible!) that will find [a-z]\r\r[a-z] and REPLACE the two carriage returns with a single-space----WITHOUT affecting the two lowercase letters at the end of paragraph1 and beginning of paragraph2

Any Ideas how I can fix this??? Please advise!! Thank-you!!


TRY THIS TOO:

Pattern Matches
(p) the pattern p and remembers it
(?P<NAME>p) the pattern p and remembers it by the specified string NAME


So, if I'm reading this correctly, modelling from my "broken" expression above it should be:
Find: ([a-z]\r{2})
Replace [a-z\r{2}]

---Nope, that doesn't work (for me) either.... Somethings' wrong here, but what???