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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Replacing multiple spaces in flat file Post 302906990 by S. BASU on Wednesday 25th of June 2014 06:05:04 AM
Old 06-25-2014
Replacing multiple spaces in flat file

Greetings all

I have a delimited text file (the delimiter is ';') where certain fields consist of many blanks e.g. ; ; and ; ;

Before I separate the data I need to eliminate these blanks altogether.

I tried the sed command using the following syntax:
Code:
sed -i 's/; *;/;;/g' <filename>

The * indicates that however many spaces are found between two semi-colons should be replaced by nothing so the string to replace with is an empty string surrounded by two semi-colons.

However I see that this only works on ASCII files whereas my files are ISO-8859. In these files this command doesn't detect multiple spaces with the * character.

Would anyone have some ideas?

Thanks & regards

Tony

Last edited by Don Cragun; 06-25-2014 at 03:43 PM.. Reason: Please use code and icode tags when spaces are important.
 

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JOIN(1) 							   User Commands							   JOIN(1)

NAME
join - join lines of two files on a common field SYNOPSIS
join [OPTION]... FILE1 FILE2 DESCRIPTION
For each pair of input lines with identical join fields, write a line to standard output. The default join field is the first, delimited by blanks. When FILE1 or FILE2 (not both) is -, read standard input. -a FILENUM also print unpairable lines from file FILENUM, where FILENUM is 1 or 2, corresponding to FILE1 or FILE2 -e EMPTY replace missing input fields with EMPTY -i, --ignore-case ignore differences in case when comparing fields -j FIELD equivalent to '-1 FIELD -2 FIELD' -o FORMAT obey FORMAT while constructing output line -t CHAR use CHAR as input and output field separator -v FILENUM like -a FILENUM, but suppress joined output lines -1 FIELD join on this FIELD of file 1 -2 FIELD join on this FIELD of file 2 --check-order check that the input is correctly sorted, even if all input lines are pairable --nocheck-order do not check that the input is correctly sorted --header treat the first line in each file as field headers, print them without trying to pair them -z, --zero-terminated line delimiter is NUL, not newline --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit Unless -t CHAR is given, leading blanks separate fields and are ignored, else fields are separated by CHAR. Any FIELD is a field number counted from 1. FORMAT is one or more comma or blank separated specifications, each being 'FILENUM.FIELD' or '0'. Default FORMAT outputs the join field, the remaining fields from FILE1, the remaining fields from FILE2, all separated by CHAR. If FORMAT is the keyword 'auto', then the first line of each file determines the number of fields output for each line. Important: FILE1 and FILE2 must be sorted on the join fields. E.g., use "sort -k 1b,1" if 'join' has no options, or use "join -t ''" if 'sort' has no options. Note, comparisons honor the rules specified by 'LC_COLLATE'. If the input is not sorted and some lines cannot be joined, a warning message will be given. AUTHOR
Written by Mike Haertel. REPORTING BUGS
GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/> Report join translation bugs to <http://translationproject.org/team/> COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. SEE ALSO
comm(1), uniq(1) Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/join> or available locally via: info '(coreutils) join invocation' GNU coreutils 8.28 January 2018 JOIN(1)
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