Shell Programming and Scripting

Greetings all

I have a delimited text file (the delimiter is ';') where certain fields consist of many blanks e.g. ; ; and ; ;

Before I separate the data I need to eliminate these blanks altogether.

I tried the sed command using the following syntax:

Code:

sed -i 's/; *;/;;/g' <filename>

The * indicates that however many spaces are found between two semi-colons should be replaced by nothing so the string to replace with is an empty string surrounded by two semi-colons.

However I see that this only works on ASCII files whereas my files are ISO-8859. In these files this command doesn't detect multiple spaces with the * character.

Would anyone have some ideas?

Thanks & regards

Tony

Try ;[[:space:]]*;

Did you mean the command?

Code:

sed -i 's/;[[:space:]]*;/;;/g' <filename>

If so it didn't work? FYI. originally i was depicting the space with literally a space or ' ' and so the command took the form:

Code:

sed -i 's/; *;/;;/g' <filename>

Neither work at the moment.

Please post a hexdump / od of your file.

Code:

awk -F; '{ for(N=1; N<=NF; N++) sub(/^[ \r\n\t]*$/, "", $N); } 1' OFS=";" inputfile > outputfile

Here is the content of the file:

Code:

AAA;1; ; ;      ;  ;XXX
  BBB;2; ; ;             ;  ;YYY

Moderator's Comments:

Code tags for code, please.

That is neither a hexdump nor an od... it's not even in code tags.

Could you try my example? It should handle most whitespace, I hope.