It's not nice to change your problem statement after someone has posted code that attempts to solve your original problem. Readers now can only guess at the problem that Ravinder was trying to help you solve.

I also note that your sample input lines contain leading spaces, but your sample output does not. Your problem statement doesn't say anything about removing leading whitespace???

Your problem statement is not clear about what should happen if more than one occurrence of == that is not adjacent to another = is present on a single line nor of what should happen to lines that do not contain any occurrences of == that are not adjacent to another =???

When posting in the UNIX & Linux forums, you might frequently hear that using Notepad++ to edit UNIX format text files is a silly mistake and that you should learn to use vi. But, since you clearly can't use grep to edit files, it isn't at all clear what you are really trying to do.

If one were trying to change each line in a file that contains the first of one or more occurrences of a string starting with a character that is not an equal sign followed by zero or more space and/or tab characters followed by exactly two equal signs followed by zero or more space and/or tab characters followed by another character that is not an equal sign so that the two equal signs and the preceding and following spaces and tabs are change to one space, two equal signs and one more space AND any leading space and/or tab characters at the start of that line are removed, and all other lines in th file are printed unchanged, one could try something like:

Code:

awk '
match($0, /[^=][[:space:]]*==[[:space:]]*[^=]/) {
	$0 = substr($0, 1, RSTART) " == " substr($0, RSTART + RLENGTH - 1)
	sub(/^[[:space:]]*/, "")
}
1' file

Of course, you also didn't bother telling us what operating system and shell you're using (which could be very important for this problem if one were to suggest code using awk or sed. If you want to try the above code on a Solaris/SunOS system, change awk to /usr/xpg4/bin/awk.