Empty List Lines on Paste from Outside Obsidian

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

I am trying to paste list items (bulleted or numbered) from outside Obsidian to Obsidian to a note.
When I paste the list, it is pasted as follows:

    - List Item 1
    
    - List Item 2
    
    - List Item 3

(Four spaces empty line is added between each list item).

This could be probably the paragraph or line breaks in the text I copied from.

I want to remove this and paste the list without those empty lines.

Things I have tried

I tried to use Linter plugin, but couldn’t find a solution that will only remove this empty line without touching rest of the content in the notes.

Expected Output

    - List Item 1
    - List Item 2
    - List Item 3

Is there any solution to this? Currently, I have to manually remove all such empty lines (sometimes even when the list is so long, the only way to do this is manual - hence this query for help.)

2

You could potentially to try to paste as plain text (cmd/ctrl + shift + v) instead paste (cmd/ctrl + v) :blush: .

I can’t guarantee the results though (as it could depend on the source of the list)

3

That removes the bullet points. The list is pasted like this:

List Item 1
List Item 2
List Item 3
4

Ok, this is clearly not perfect/ideal but you potentially could then select the 3 lines, right-click on the selection and select Bullet list under the Paragraph menu :sweat_smile: …

That should turn each line into a bullet point…

5

These workarounds are fine. I have already done all those.

The purpose of posting here was to get help solving the issue. Or potentially identifying a bug in the software - for the developers.

But thanks. I followed your suggested solution before I posted this query here.

6

Perhaps PDF Paste plugin. In my experience it is very good at picking up unwanted newlines and such, but retains other formatting, so presumably bullets as well.

7

Tried this plugin but doesn’t format bullets :frowning:

8

I have a slightly more convenient work-around for this. It doesn’t automatically remove the space upon pasting, but you can remove all the extra blank lines in a few seconds.

In google docs, you can enable regular expressions in Replace & Find, to remove all extra blank lines by entering \n(?=\n) in ‘Find’, nothing in ‘replace’. This can be applied to Obsidian with the help of the community plugin ‘Regex Find/Replace’.

  1. in settings → third-party plugins → browse community plugins → type in Regex → download it
  2. go back to third-party plugins → scroll down to find Regex → find the gear icon at the right side → set hotkeys to something you remember (i recommend Ctrl + J cuz it’s near Ctrl + F and doesn’t conflict with other hotkeys)
  3. open Regex’s Replace/Find with the hotkey, enter \n(?=\n) in ‘Find’, nothing in ‘replace’. By nothing, I mean blank, no need to enter anything

This should remove all the extra blank lines between paragraphs. This is convenient for me as a novel writer, but I don’t know if it’d be extra work for you to re-enter those blank lines between sections. Hopefully this will help someone.

9

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