Shell Programming and Scripting

It's not a control character. It's e-acute and it's present in the OP's text.

Jotne's probably using a locale whose alpha class does not include that letter, e.g. the POSIX locale.

Further, while e-acute is a single byte in iso8859-1, in utf-8 it's multibyte.

Your approach could be made simpler and more robust by using the complement of the digit class.

Regards,
Alister

---------- Post updated at 05:35 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:27 PM ----------

I see that I was beaten to it by 6 minutes. Obviously, I concur with jlliagre.

Regards,
Alister

Or use my solution in post #3

Indeed, an astute way of using delimiters.

Here is the shortest awk based answer I can think of, using Yoda tricks:

Code:

awk '{gsub("[^0-9]+"," ");NF-=2}1' infile

I like the tr solution.
But it needs \n to not fold the lines.
Retain the original number positions:

Code:

tr -c '[:digit:]\n' '[ *]' < file

Sqeeze the space to one:

Code:

tr -sc '[:digit:]\n' '[ *]' < file

BTW with sed these are

Code:

sed 's/[^[:digit:]]/ /g' file

Code:

sed 's/[^[:digit:]]\{1,\}/ /g' file

In \{n,m\} a missing m means "at least n".
In ERE this is {n,m} - but some awk do not have it implemented (and {1,} is the same as +).

Woops. Nice catch. Thank you for pointing it out.

Regards,
Alister