Deleting spaces between two records in a file

[hello99hello]

I have these file containing the folowwing records:

Lai Phat 37739 jdsk876

Dema Koheen 346747 jsdfjkla990

Lar Solomon 484848 jfsaj898

When I do wc -l file1, it reports 5 records. Thereby counting the line-space before and after "Dema Koheen 346747 jsdfjkla990" as record lines.

I was wondering if there is a script I can run to eliminate the line space before and after "Dema Koheen 346747 jsdfjkla990". Just so my file1 could look like:

Lai Phat 37739 jdsk876
Dema Koheen 346747 jsdfjkla990
Lar Solomon 484848 jfsaj898

and my wc -l could report 3 records.

Thanks for your help.

 

[CaKiwi]

One way is

awk 'NF' infile | wc -l

CaKiwi

 

[hello99hello]

Thanks...your solution is counting the non-space records. However, I am interested in deleting the space records.

 

[CaKiwi]

awk 'NF' infile > outfile
wc -l outfile

CaKiwi