I’m having trouble with a Google Docs file. It’s full of subtitle text with timestamps and lots of line breaks. I want to turn it into one big chunk of text without the timestamps. Here’s what I’m dealing with:
0:01:23.456,0:01:24.789
Hello
0:01:24.789,0:01:27.123
How are you doing today?
0:01:27.123,0:01:30.456
I hope you're having a great time
What I’m aiming for is something like this:
Hello How are you doing today? I hope you’re having a great time
I know I need to use some kind of find and replace thing, but I’m not sure how to do it. Can someone give me a step-by-step guide on how to clean this up in Google Docs? I’d really appreciate any help!
hey, use find and replace in gdocs. search for the timestamp regex like \d+:\d+:\d+.\d+,\d+:\d+:\d+.\d+ and replace with blank. then, replace double line breaks with a space to merge the text. you might need to check spacing afterwards.
I encountered a similar issue a few months ago while working on subtitle files. The key is to remove both the timestamp lines and the extra line breaks in two separate steps. First, you can use the Find and Replace tool in Google Docs to remove the timestamps by using a regular expression pattern that matches them. After that, replace consecutive line breaks with a space and remove any remaining single line breaks. This approach will help consolidate your text into one coherent paragraph, though you might need a quick check to fix any spacing anomalies.
Dealing with this issue has been part of my experience with editing transcribed content. I solved it by making careful use of Google Docs’ Find and Replace functionality. Initially, I identified a regular expression pattern that matched the timestamps and replaced them with nothing. Then I tackled the extra line breaks by replacing double line breaks with a space, and later removed any remaining single line breaks in a similar manner. After these steps, I reviewed the text for any awkward spacing and made minor manual adjustments. This method may require a bit of trial and error, but it ultimately streamlines the cleanup process.