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Remove multiline text between brackets

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# 1  
Old 12-02-2013
Remove multiline text between brackets
I have some text in a file like so

Code:
This is {the 
first day 
of} my life.

What I would like as output is

Code:
This is
my life.

Any text between the curly braces is removed. In the forums I've found statements like

Code:
sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'

but the problem is that I think that works only line by line, i.e. in the above example, the text "first day" passes through and I don't want that.

Braces may occur many times in the file. Like here might be a full example.

Input:
Code:
 
This is {the 
first day 
of} my life
I swear {I 
was born right} 
in the doorway
I went out {in 
the rain} suddenly 
{everything} changed
They're 
{spreading 
blankets} on the beach

Output:
Code:
 
This is  
my life
I swear 
in the doorway
I went out 
suddenly 
changed
They're 
on the beach

Essentially, think of the text between curly brackets as comments and I only want to leave the code.

Removing blank lines and trimming whitespace nice but not necessary. It would be nice to write it as a shell command, e.g. sed, awk etc. I'm using Cygwin.
# 2  
Old 12-02-2013
One solution would be to slurp the file into a scalar and modify as below...
Code:
$ perl -e ' $text="This is {the
first day
of} my life
I swear {I
was born right}
in the doorway
I went out {in
the rain} suddenly
{everything} changed
Theyre
> {spreading
>  blankets} on the beach"; $text=~s/\{[^}]+\}//sg; print $text'
This is  my life
I swear
in the doorway
I went out  suddenly
 changed
Theyre
 on the beach

This User Gave Thanks to Skrynesaver For This Post:
climatron
# 3  
Old 12-02-2013
Code:
perl -0777pe'
  s/{[^}]*\n+.*?}\s+/\n/sg;
  s/{.*?}\s+//sg;
  s/\n+/\n/sg
  ' infile

Last edited by radoulov; 12-02-2013 at 08:33 AM.. Reason: Corrected.
This User Gave Thanks to radoulov For This Post:
climatron
# 4  
Old 12-02-2013
I don't read perl, but this solved my problem.

For reference, if I was testing for another character, e.g. between parenthesis or square brackets, are any of the above "{" or "}" special?

So for example,

Code:
perl -0777pe'
  s/\([^)]*\n+.*?)\s+/\n/sg;
  s/\(.*?)\s+//sg;
  s/\n+/\n/sg
  ' infile

doesn't work for parentheses, I don't think?
# 5  
Old 12-02-2013
Escape both open and close parenthesis and it will work:
Code:
perl -0777pe'
  s/\([^)]*\n+.*?\)\s+/\n/sg;
  s/\(.*?\)\s+//sg;
  s/\n+/\n/sg
  ' infile

You don't need to escape the curly braces in this context,
I corrected my previous post.
Last edited by radoulov; 12-02-2013 at 08:34 AM..
This User Gave Thanks to radoulov For This Post:
climatron
# 6  
Old 12-03-2013
Code:
 perl -ne 'BEGIN{$/=undef} {s/\{(.*?)\}//sg; print;}' filename

# 7  
Old 12-03-2013
Also try:
Code:
awk '{print $2} NR==1' RS={ FS="} " ORS= file
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