Shell Programming and Scripting

I have the following text as an input text:

input.txt

Code:

Results('Toilet', 'Sink', )

and i want to remove the last comma so the output is

output.txt

Code:

Results('Toilet', 'Sink' )

I tried using the following sed command, but I get a parsing error:

Code:

sed s/, \)/\)/g input.txt > output.txt

Code:

echo 'Results('Toilet', 'Sink', )'  | sed 's:, ):):g'

thanks. I have a text file with a bunch of Results('xxx', 'yyy', ), so i was hoping i didn't have to use the command echo.

you don't have to , use like sed 's:, ):):g' infile > outfile.
I posted with echo so that you can quickly check if it's generating right output.

This will remove the comma only if it is followed by " )" and - even worse - will remove any comma followed by " )" in the line.

A more robust approach will be to search for the last occurrence of a character in the line and remove this:

Code:

echo "<your_string_here>" | sed 's/,[^,]*$//'

This will remove the last occurrence of "," in a line, regardless of what it is followed. This method can be used to search for (and maybe change) any last character of some sort:

Code:

sed 's/<character>[^<character>]*$/ .../'

searches for <character> followed by any number of (*) "not-characters" (this is what "[^<character>]" means: "^" is a logical NOT for character classes) followed by a line-end. Therefore, if it matches, it will match only the last character of a sort in a line.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

isn't that what he wants ?