Remove Empty Lines 🗑️

Every so often you end up with text from a file, an API, or a paste that's full of blank lines and trailing whitespace - a prompt list, a batch of filenames, a caption dump - and you want it tidy before it goes downstream. That's this node. It's a focused text cleaner with a genuinely useful set of modes, and it tells you exactly what it removed.

How it works

It splits your text on newlines, processes each line, and reassembles. The three modes are the interesting part:

• strict - removes only lines that are completely empty (zero characters). A line containing spaces survives.
• loose - removes empty lines and lines that are only whitespace. This is the one you usually want for pasted text.
• trim_only - removes nothing; just strips leading/trailing whitespace from every line. It's a trim tool in a node's clothing.

Then there are two quality-of-life toggles. trim_lines (on by default) strips each line's edges. preserve_single_empty keeps a single blank line where multiple empties collapsed - which is how you keep paragraph breaks in prose instead of smashing a whole document into one blob. It treats "groups" of blank lines, so a paragraph break survives as exactly one blank line.

Inputs and outputs

Inputs: text (multiline), mode (strict / loose / trim_only), preserve_single_empty, trim_lines. That's the whole surface - no optional extras to get lost in.

Outputs: processed_text (the cleaned result), statistics (a summary - original line count, final count, removed count, empty-line groups, mode) and removed_lines_count (the number of lines dropped, as an INT). The stats string is plain and readable, and it's honestly the most useful output after the text itself: when you're debugging why a batch came out short, knowing how many lines got eaten is gold.

Who it's for

If your workflows hand-clean prompt text with a dozen text nodes, this collapses that into one node with a count output. If you never have this problem, you won't miss it - it's a niche utility, not a headline feature. The removed_lines_count output does give you a cheap way to detect "the input was empty of real content," which is sneakily handy for routing.

Installing

Part of the ZMG pack. ComfyUI Manager → search "ZMG" / "ComfyUI-ZMG-Nodes", or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/vanche1212/ComfyUI-ZMG-Nodes
cd ComfyUI-ZMG-Nodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart; it lives under ZMGNodes/data. Pure standard-library string handling, so no extra dependencies. Set it to loose for pasted text, keep preserve_single_empty on for prose, and it just works.