Also is it possible to combine this with removing periods from within the string? The sentence may have spaces which I'd like to keep.
Search for
^[\r\n]+|\.|[\r\n]+$
and replace with nothing.
The specific syntax will depend on the language you're using, e. g. in C#:
resultString = Regex.Replace(subjectString, @"^[\r\n]+|\.|[\r\n]+$", "");
in PHP:
$result = preg_replace('/^[\r\n]+|\.|[\r\n]+$/', '', $subject);
in JavaScript:
result = subject.replace(/^[\r\n]+|\.|[\r\n]+$/g, "");
etc...