Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,

I am trying to figure out how to get rid of whitespace that is in certain areas (Title) of HTML pages that are created be a python script.

IE:

This is the title. (tabs are creating these spaces)

This is another title. (tabs are creating these spaces)
The python script is pulling from another database that inserts tabs.
I am looking for a line or two or code that will delete these tabs. I could manually go in and vi one of the pages but there are 1000's of pages.

I gather you are not a python programmer - why not use sed -

Code:

sed 's/[    ]$//g' filename > newfile

The [ ] thing has two characters in it - a space and what you get from pressing the tab key.

so the tabs are at the end of the line? you can just use strip()

Code:

>>> astring="this is a title\t\t"
>>> repr(astring)
"'this is a title\\t\\t'"
>>> astring=astring.strip()
>>> repr(astring)
"'this is a title'"

No the tabs are in the middle of the Titles.

"This is [tab, tab] a title".

I am trying to turn that into:

"This is a title"

Of course there are 1000's of titles so they are not all the same but they all have the two tabs right in the middle of the titles.

Thanks for your assistance.

You would be correct. It was just handed off to me.

Since there are thousands of pages and titles this approach may not work?

thanks for your assistance.

then just use split and join

Code:

>>> astring="this is\t\ta\t\ttime"
>>> print astring
this is         a               time
>>> print ' '.join(astring.split())
this is a time