Like I wrote already, you would run the latest script in addition to the earlier one. If you want to integrate them into your processing, here is a combined script which does all of the above.

Code:

perl -0777 -pi~ -e 's/ *\r?\n *([-~\d])/ $1/g; 
    s/:\s*(\d+)?\s*(~|$)/: $1 $2/mg; s/  */ /g;' file1.txt file2.txt

The -i option causes the original file to be replaced, and the ~ argument to -i causes a backup of the original to me moved to the same file name (including path) with a tilde appended to the original name. If you don't want a backup, leave out the tilde argument.

The -0777 option causes the whole file to be read as a single "line", so that we can do substitutions straddling newline boundaries easily.

The regular expression substitutions do the following:

s/ *\r?\n *([-~\d])/ $1/g replaces a newline \n and any adjacent spaces with a single space if followed by dash, tilde, or a number [-~\d]. This takes care of wrapping. The \r? allows for an optional DOS carriage return before the newline.

s/:\s*(\d+)?\s*(~|$)/: $1 $2/mg normalizes spacing patterns for field values. A colon followed by a number \d+ followed by a tilde or end of line $ with arbitrary runs of spaces between them (including none) are replaced with exactly one space between the colon, the number, and the tilde. The question mark after (\d+) makes the number optional, which should take care of simply colon followed by tilde as well.

s/ */ /g replaces runs of two or more spaces with a single space.

The /g option causes each substitution to be performed globally (without it, only the first occurrence will be substituted). The /m option causes the regular expression $ to match a newline anywhere in a multi-line string, as well as the end of the string.

Generally, in s/any (stuff)/$1, the value of $1 on the right-hand side will be whatever matched the first set of parentheses on the left-hand side. In the case of nested parentheses, they are numbered sequentially from the left by the opening parentheses, so in s/(foo(bar)(baz))/$1 $2 $3/ you would have "foobarbaz" in $1 and "bar" in $2 and "baz" in $3 (and so the result of the whole substitution would be to replace "foobarbaz" with "foobarbaz bar baz").