Whitespace Tools

Tools to normalize end-of-line (EOL) & beginning-of-line (BOL) whitespace in text files.

Installation

Install the tools with:

npm install whitespace-tools

This will install the spacer and ender tools. Or run the latest version directly from npmjs.org with:

npx -p whitespace-tools spacer ...
npx -p whitespace-tools ender ...

Ender

The ender tool will normalize line endings. Run ender --help for a list of options.

Run with a file name or pipe a file into the tool to get information on current line endings:

ender src/mySourceFile.js
cat someTextFile.txt | ender

To convert a file, supply --new-eol as one of cr, lf, crlf or auto. If no -output-file option is given, the file will go to STDOUT.

Spacer

The spacer tool will normalize line beginnings, up to the first non-whitespace character. Run spacer --help for options.

Run with a file name or pipe a file into the tool to get information on current line beginnings:

spacer src/mySourcFile.js
cat someTextFile.txt | spacer

You can supply the --new-bol argument with either spaces, tabs or auto. If the file has existing tabs, supply the --tab-size argument indicating how many spaces a tab represents. If tabs is supplied as --new-bol, supply the --round flag if you wish extra spaces to be rounded down to a whole tab. Without this flag, the outputted file will still be reported as having mixed BOL's if there are any odd spaces in the BOL's.

About This project

I've implemented this project in C#, Ruby, Python and now Javascript as a way to learn new programming languages, and also because they are really useful tools! A search across projects in GitHub will reveal just how many files have mixtures of tabs & spaces at line BOL's. Line ending problems are a little rarer these days, but they do still occur from time-to-time.

The project is written in ES6 Javascript and cross compiled using Babel. It currently targets Node 8. PR's welcome for any enhancements.