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Need help removing leading spaces from one field in comma seperated file

 
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# 1  
Old 06-13-2012
Need help removing leading spaces from one field in comma seperated file
Using awk or sed, I'd like to remove leading spaces after a comma and before a right justified number in field 6. Sounds simple but I can't find a solution. Each field's formatting must stay intact.

Input:
Code:
40,123456-02,160,05/24/2012,02/13/1977, 10699.15,0

Output:
Code:
40,123456-02,160,05/24/2012,02/13/1977,10699.15,0

Any help is appreciated!

~Scottie
Last edited by joeyg; 06-13-2012 at 02:13 PM.. Reason: Please wrap data and sripts with CodeTags
# 2  
Old 06-13-2012
Your example only showed this occurring once; not sure if it occurs outside of that 6th column. But...

Code:
echo 40,123456-02,160,05/24/2012,02/13/1977, 10699.15,0 | sed 's/, /,/'
40,123456-02,160,05/24/2012,02/13/1977,10699.15,0

# 3  
Old 06-15-2012
My apologies. My original post was not very clear. I don't have any code yet for awk or sed, just a file with multiple lines of data that look like the example below (this is better than my original example):

Code:
 1,  3456-78, 42,05/02/2012,05/12/1984,  1230.00, 4

What I'd like to do is remove leading spaces from every field, if any, while retaining the existing formatting of each field's number. So after some scripting magic the above line should look like:

Code:
1,3456-78,42,05/02/2012,05/12/1984,1230.00,4

Thanks a bunch for your help!
# 4  
Old 06-15-2012
Hi Scottie1954,

Try the following, there are two spaces before the star;

Code:
cat "filename" | sed 's/,  */,/g' > "newfilename"

Regards

Dave
This User Gave Thanks to gull04 For This Post:
Scottie1954
# 5  
Old 06-15-2012
That got me going the right direction, so thank you.

It took me two steps to get what I wanted:

Code:
sed 's/,  */,/g' FILE1 >junk1     # remove leading spaces before commas

Code:
sed 's/^ *//' junk1 >junk2        # remove leading space(s) from beginning of line

There's probably a more efficent way to combine the two but this got the job done.
# 6  
Old 06-15-2012
Hi Scottie1954,

Sorry I didn't look at the post properly, it would have worked with;

Code:
cat "filename" | sed 's/  */,/g' > "newfilename"

Where the command is the same as before, just minus the comma ","

Regards

Dave
 
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