Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have a file with rows like below delimited with pipe (|)
I want to remove all the leading and trailing white space from each and every fields keeping the delimiter intact.

I have tired this

Code:

sed 's/[  ]*//g;s/[  ]*$//g'

but the result is incorrect
it is removing a whitespace from field "12 erttt".

I just want to remove the leading and trailing white space from all the fields.

Thanks,

Code:

sed 's:[ ]*|[ ]*:|:g' input > output

sed 's/[ ]*//g;s/[ ]*$//g' your code is not correct :

s/[ ]*//g this would remove any number of successive blank space g = globally so the pattern is replaced even if appearing many times in the same line ...

... including when it appear at the enf of line ! ... so the next s/[ ]*$//g is useless since your previous command would already have removed all space found wherever they appear in the line

... unfortunately including in a middle of a field

What you need is just to remove the space that are next to the | delimiter (see my code)

you could also write it

Code:

sed 's/[ ]*|[ ]*/|/g' input > output

Hi,

Another one:

Inside brackets there are two characters: one space and one tab.

Code:

sed 's/|[     ]*/|/g;s/[      ]*|/|/g' infile

Regards,
Birei

You can gather it in one substitution command :

Code:

sed 's/[     ]*|[     ]*/|/g' infile

Code:

$ ruby -ne 'puts $_.strip' file

Full solution

Code:

$  awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="|"}{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {sub(/^ */,"",$i);sub(/ *$|\..*$/,"",$i)}}1' infile

LT4677582LN|ABC|12 erttt|345345|

Code:

sed 's/ *| */|/g' input > output