Login or Register to Ask a Question and Join Our Community


Shell Programming and Scripting

Remove special characters from text file

Login to Discuss or Reply to this Discussion in Our Community

 
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Remove special characters from text file
# 8  
Old 12-07-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by Scrutinizer
What about
Code:
tr -d '[:punct:]' < trial.txt > output.txt

Where does that differ from your desired result?

I was about to reply you.
I tried your code, looked like the spaces are still being truncated. I wanted to reconfirm that before I replied to you.

May be I should use the variable in quotes as suggested by fans. I will check that and reply back
# 9  
Old 12-07-2009
I am not sure I understand. You do not need the while read loop anymore, just the tr statement. If you do that, what gets truncated?
# 10  
Old 12-07-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by kkb
only one problem we need to use a newline character some where so that the output is in the same form as input. I was unable to fix it
Right, try this one:
Code:
tr -cd '\ \t\n[:alnum:]' < infile > outfile

# 11  
Old 12-07-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by pludi
If I interpret you correctly, you want to remove all characters except A-Z (any case) and 0-9, and preserve any whitespaces, right? If so:
Code:
perl -pe 's/[^A-Za-z0-9\s]//g' trial.txt > output.txt


this works great. Thank you.

just curious : I tried to used the same expression with SED.
Is there any way to exclude tabbed spaces in the regular expression. ?

---------- Post updated at 10:08 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:06 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by danmero
Right, try this one:
Code:
tr -cd '\ \t\n[:alnum:]' < infile > outfile


This works perfect. thank you very much. This forum is just awesome. I learn t a lot by just posting one question

---------- Post updated at 10:14 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:08 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Scrutinizer
I am not sure I understand. You do not need the while read loop anymore, just the tr statement. If you do that, what gets truncated?

Sorry. I used it wrong. It works perfectly Thank you very much.
Login or Register to Ask a Question

Previous Thread | Next Thread

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

To remove any invisible and special characters from the file(exclude @#!$*)

Hi Guys, My requirement is to remove any invisible and special characters from the file like control M(carriage return) and alt numerics and it should not replace @#!$% abc|xyz|acd¥£ó adc|123| 12áí Please help on this. Thanks Rakesh (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: rakeshp
1 Replies

2. UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

To remove any invisible and special characters from the file(exclude @!#$&*)

Hi Guys, My requirement is to remove any invisible and special characters from the file like control M(carriage return) and alt numerics and it should not replace @#!$% abc|xyz|acd¥£ó adc|123| 12áí Please help on this. Thanks Rakesh (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: rakeshp
1 Replies

3. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How to enter special characters in a text file using vi?

Hi, I need to create a test text file with the special characters \342\200\223 in it and to be able to use sed maybe to delete them I tried doing it using vi by pressing CTRL-V and then typing 342 but it does not work. After pressing CTRL-V and typing 342 it seems to just insert the numbers... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: newbie_01
1 Replies

4. Shell Programming and Scripting

Remove Special Characters Within Text

Hi, I have a "|" delimited file that is exported from a database. There is one column in the file which has description/comments entered by some application user. It has "Control-M" character and "New Line" character in between the text. Hence, when i export the data, this record with the new... (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: tarun.trehan
4 Replies

5. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

What my puzzle file!, How to remove special characters ??

My application generate file but it have special characters in these file. I would like to clear special characters by vi editor and not use cat /dev/null > to_file I try to remove characters manually, but I'm can not! root@MyHost /tmp> ls -l puzzle.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 root system ... (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: arm_naja
5 Replies

6. Shell Programming and Scripting

remove the special characters and move the file into another server

(5 Replies)
Discussion started by: number10
5 Replies

7. Shell Programming and Scripting

Read file and remove special characters or strings

Hello all I am getting data like col1 | col2 | col3 asdafa | asdfasfa | asf*&^sgê 345./ |sdfasd23425^%^&^ | sdfsa23 êsfsfd | sf(* | sdfsasf My requirement is like I have to to read the file and remove all special characters and hex characters ranging form 00-1f from 1st column, remove %"'... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: vasuarjula
1 Replies

8. Solaris

How to remove a directory or file with special characters in Solaris

I finally figured out how to remove a file or directory with special characters in the name. It's kind of rudimentary so I thought I would share it with everyone: find .inum -exec rm -rf {} \; (7 Replies)
Discussion started by: jastanle84
7 Replies

9. Shell Programming and Scripting

Adding text to file on certain lines with(special characters)

I need to add "new lines" of text with special characters, to specific lines in the file. There are 3 modifications needed. Been testing 2 here without success. #!/usr/bin/perl use FileHandle; $file=FileHandle->new; $FILENAME="/opt/etc/usr/file.txt"; $file->open ("<$FILENAME") or die... (13 Replies)
Discussion started by: A4ron4perl
13 Replies

10. Shell Programming and Scripting

remove special characters from text using PERL

Hi, I am stuck with a problem here. Suppose i have a variable which is assigned some string containing special charatcers. for eg: $a="abcdef^bbwk#kdbcd@"; I have to remove the special characters using Perl. The text is assigned to the variable implicitly. How to do it? (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: agarwal
1 Replies
Login or Register to Ask a Question