Well, the ^ could match the newline after "def", and the $ could match the newline before 'gh'. and all the newlines between those two are greedily accepted by the \s+ and thus eliminated.

^ matching *after* a newline means the first newline would not be included and eliminated. $ matching before a newline means the last newline is not eliminated either.

Those two newlines make for one blank line between the non-blank lines, and any excess whitespace including newlines between them is removed.

In reply to Re^4: regex doubt on excluding by SuicideJunkie
in thread regex doubt on excluding by Anonymous Monk

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