I am looking for a regular expression that uses sed to replace multiple spaces with single spaces on every line where it is not at the start of the line and not immediately before double slashes ('//') or between quotes (").
In its simplest form, it would look like this:
It should therefore perform an inline replacement of this:
into this (only one occurrence of double spaces replaced):
However, it should ignore any spaces at the start of the line:
And it should ignore everything between quotes:
And it should ignore all white spaces up to the double slashes:
How would I combine all these regular expressions in a single command and using sed?
I want to write a script which will check the arguments and if there is a single space(if 2 more more space in a row , then do not touch), replace it with _ and then gather the argument
so, program will be ran
./programname hi hello hi usa now hello hello
so, inside of program,... (7 Replies)
I'm reading from a file that is semi-colon delimited. One of the fields contains 2 spaces separating the first and last name (4th field in - "JOHN<space><space> DOE"):
e.g. TORONTO;ONTARIO;1 YONGE STREET;JOHN DOE;CANADA
When I read this record and either echo/print to screen or write to... (4 Replies)
I am searching while I await a response to this so if it has been asked already I apologize.
I have a file with lines in it that look like:
bob johnson email@email.org
I need it to look like:
bob:johnson:email@email.org
I am trying to use sed like this:
sed -e 's/ /:/g' file >... (5 Replies)
Hi all,
Is there a way to perform the above, I am trying to strip out more than one space from a line, but keep the single space. See below output example.
My Name is test test2 test3 test4 test5
My Name is test test2 test3 test4 test5
Please note that the lines would contain... (7 Replies)
consider the small piece of code
while read line
do
echo $line
done < example
content of example file
sadasdasdasdsa erwerewrwr ergdgdfgf rgerg erwererwr
the output is like
sadasdasdasdsa erwerewrwr ergdgdfgf rgerg erwererwr
the... (4 Replies)
I am trying to read a txt file and trying to translate multiples spaces into single spaces so the file is more organized, but whenever I try the command:
tr ' ' ' ' w.txt
The output is:
tr: extra operand `w.txt'
Try `tr --help' for more information.
Can someone please help? :wall:
... (2 Replies)
Platform : RHEL 5.8
I want to end each line of this file with a single quote.
$ cat hello.txt
blueskies
minnie
mickey
gravity
snoopyAt VI editor's command mode, I have used the following command to replace the last character with a single quote.
~
~
~
:%s/$/'/gNow, the lines in the... (10 Replies)
From:
1,2,3,4,5,This is a test
6,7,8,9,0,"This, is a test"
1,9,2,8,3,"This is a ""test"""
4,7,3,1,8,""""
To:
1,2,3,4,5,This is a test
6,7,8,9,0,"This; is a test"
1,9,2,8,3,"This is a ''test''"
4,7,3,1,8,"''"Is there an easy syntax I'm overlooking? There will always be an odd number... (5 Replies)
Hi All.
Attached are two files.
I ran a query and have the output as in the file with name "FILEWITHFOURRECORDS.txt "
I didn't want all the spaces between the columns so I squeezed the spaces with the "tr" command and also added a carriage return at the end of every line.
But in two... (3 Replies)
Hi I want to read a text file and replace various number of spaces between each string in to a single "," or any other character .Please let me know the command to do so. My input file is a txt file which is the output of a SQL table extract so it contains so many spaces between each column of the... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: Hari Prasanth
2 Replies
LEARN ABOUT MOJAVE
fmt
FMT(1) BSD General Commands Manual FMT(1)NAME
fmt -- simple text formatter
SYNOPSIS
fmt [-cmnps] [-d chars] [-l num] [-t num] [goal [maximum] | -width | -w width] [file ...]
DESCRIPTION
The fmt utility is a simple text formatter which reads the concatenation of input files (or standard input if none are given) and produces on
standard output a version of its input with lines as close to the goal length as possible without exceeding the maximum. The goal length
defaults to 65 and the maximum to 10 more than the goal length. Alternatively, a single width parameter can be specified either by prepend-
ing a hyphen to it or by using -w. For example, ``fmt -w 72'', ``fmt -72'', and ``fmt 72 72'' all produce identical output. The spacing at
the beginning of the input lines is preserved in the output, as are blank lines and interword spacing. Lines are joined or split only at
white space; that is, words are never joined or hyphenated.
The options are as follows:
-c Center the text, line by line. In this case, most of the other options are ignored; no splitting or joining of lines is done.
-m Try to format mail header lines contained in the input sensibly.
-n Format lines beginning with a '.' (dot) character. Normally, fmt does not fill these lines, for compatibility with nroff(1).
-p Allow indented paragraphs. Without the -p flag, any change in the amount of whitespace at the start of a line results in a new para-
graph being begun.
-s Collapse whitespace inside lines, so that multiple whitespace characters are turned into a single space. (Or, at the end of a sen-
tence, a double space.)
-d chars
Treat the chars (and no others) as sentence-ending characters. By default the sentence-ending characters are full stop ('.'), ques-
tion mark ('?') and exclamation mark ('!'). Remember that some characters may need to be escaped to protect them from your shell.
-l number
Replace multiple spaces with tabs at the start of each output line, if possible. Each number spaces will be replaced with one tab.
The default is 8. If number is 0, spaces are preserved.
-t number
Assume that the input files' tabs assume number spaces per tab stop. The default is 8.
The fmt utility is meant to format mail messages prior to sending, but may also be useful for other simple tasks. For instance, within vis-
ual mode of the ex(1) editor (e.g., vi(1)) the command
!}fmt
will reformat a paragraph, evening the lines.
ENVIRONMENT
The LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the execution of fmt as described in environ(7).
SEE ALSO fold(1), mail(1), nroff(1)HISTORY
The fmt command appeared in 3BSD.
The version described herein is a complete rewrite and appeared in FreeBSD 4.4.
AUTHORS
Kurt Shoens
Liz Allen (added goal length concept)
Gareth McCaughan
BUGS
The program was designed to be simple and fast - for more complex operations, the standard text processors are likely to be more appropriate.
When the first line of an indented paragraph is very long (more than about twice the goal length), the indentation in the output can be
wrong.
The fmt utility is not infallible in guessing what lines are mail headers and what lines are not.
BSD August 2, 2004 BSD