A variant of the hypergraph removal lemma

Recent work of Gowers and Nagle, R\"odl, Schacht, and Skokan has established a hypergraph removal lemma, which in turn implies some results of Szemer\'edi and Furstenberg-Katznelson concerning one-dimensional and multi-dimensional arithmetic progressions respectively. In this paper we shall give a self-contained proof of this hypergraph removal lemma. In fact we prove a slight strengthening of the result, which we will use in a subsequent paper to establish infinitely many constellations of a prescribed shape in the Gaussian primes.