notepad++ – Piyush Gupta Blog

How to show all hidden characters in Notepad++

Author : Piyush Gupta

The way to enable this depends on your version of Notepad++.

On newer versions you can use:

Menu View → Show Symbol → *Show All Characters`

Menu View → Show Symbol → Show White Space and TAB

On older versions you can look for:

Menu View → Show all characters

Menu View → Show White Space and TAB

How to convert tabs to spaces in Notepad++

Author : Piyush Gupta

To convert existing tabs to spaces, press Edit->Blank Operations->TAB to Space.

If in the future you want to enter spaces instead of tab when you press tab key:

Go to Settings->Preferences...->Language (since version 7.1) or Settings->Preferences...->Tab Settings (previous versions)
Check Replace by space
(Optional) You can set the number of spaces to use in place of a Tab by changing the Tab size field.

How to remove all spaces from file in Notepad++?

Author : Piyush Gupta

There are two way to remove all spaces from file in Notepad.

Using Regular expression
Direct Method

Using Regular expression:

To delete all spaces in the file, replace ' +' with '' (quotes only for demonstration, please remove them). You need to have the checkbox “Regular expression” checked.

To remove all spaces and tabs, replace '[ \t]+' with '' (remove quotes).

This works for big files, too, where the solution of direct method will be tiresome.

Direct Method:

No need for regular expressions. In Find (Used Ctrl + H) what add a white space character and then replace with nothing.