The -m minify option should remove blank lines

[simonw]

Currently it ends up with a LOT of lines that are just whitespace:

curl -s 'https://apnews.com/article/trump-federal-employees-firings-a85d1aaf1088e050d39dcf7e3664bb9f' | \
  strip-tags -m

Output includes:

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.







     
twitter
  



     
instagram

Replacing space character with . to make the whitespace visible gives:

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press  All Rights Reserved.







.....
twitter
..



.....
instagram

[simonw]

Prototype for a fix:

    if remove_blank_lines:
        # Remove any line that is just whitespace
        final = "\n".join(line for line in final.splitlines() if line.strip())

[simonw]

I'm going to leave the Python library version stable and add a new remove_blank_lines=True option, but I'll have the CLI -m option use that.

[simonw]

This is much more pleasing now:

curl -s 'https://apnews.com/article/trump-federal-employees-firings-a85d1aaf1088e050d39dcf7e3664bb9f' | \
  strip-tags -m

Partial output:

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