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How to remove spaces from a file selectively?

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# 8  
Old 10-01-2014
none of them are working.
okay lets make my question very simple.
I have an excel sheet in which i just want to sed one space which is coming in the second column data.

Code:
column1        column2      column3      column4
date is here    _alia

The underscore in red color indicates the space. So now i just want to delete this one space from the entire second column.
# 9  
Old 10-01-2014
How would you propose to distinguish that space from the one(s) before? In awk default, ALL spaces are the field separators, so they would be gone anyhow. In sed, there's no fields, so you would need to know the space count in order to remove that one...
# 10  
Old 10-01-2014
Quote:
Originally Posted by RudiC
Leaving out the code tags you hid all those multiple spaces from us thus leading to inappropriate solutions. With that new info, try
Code:
sed -r 's/ +/ /g; s/DATA //p; 1s/^[^ ]* //p; 2!d' file1
Date Name Age State
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
12 Sep 2014 14:00 EST Alia 22 Chennai
12 Sep 2014 14:00 EST Ashika 22 Chennai
12 Sep 2014 14:00 EST Bosky 22 Chennai
12 Sep 2014 14:00 EST Swati 22 Chennai

It gives an error to me saying sed -r is not recognized

---------- Post updated at 08:03 AM ---------- Previous update was at 08:02 AM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by RudiC
How would you propose to distinguish that space from the one(s) before? In awk default, ALL spaces are the field separators, so they would be gone anyhow. In sed, there's no fields, so you would need to know the space count in order to remove that one...
The space count is one for that column which i want to remove
# 11  
Old 10-01-2014
Try
Code:
sed 's/  */ /g; s/DATA //p; 1s/^[^ ]* //p; 2!d' file

# 12  
Old 10-01-2014
Ok so its very simple i have a text file okay which has four columns like below:
Code:
column1          column2     column3      column4

16 jan 1994       _alia1        22        chennai 
17 jan 1994       _alia2        22        chennai 
18 jan 1994       _alia3        22        chennai 
19 jan 1994       _alia4        22        chennai

and from this file i want to remove that one space which is coming in name and move it to another file which is an excel sheet so that it comes like below:

Code:
column1          column2     column3      column4

16 jan 1994       alia1        22        chennai 
17 jan 1994       alia2        22        chennai 
18 jan 1994       alia3        22        chennai 
19 jan 1994       alia4        22        chennai

---------- Post updated at 10:23 AM ---------- Previous update was at 08:11 AM ----------

can we do this?? please reply i need help with this Smilie Smilie
# 13  
Old 10-01-2014
First, let me be very clear: If you have a text file, feeding it through awk, grep, sed, and/or tr is not going to magically convert that text file into the proprietary format of a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet!

If you have the text file you have shown us in post #12 in this thread, you can create the output you say you want in that post as a text file using the command:
Code:
sed '3,$s/  / /' file.txt

# 14  
Old 10-06-2014
Hi Don,

sorry for the confusion and the mess created by me. Smilie
I have only the xls file which has this data
Code:
column1          column2     column3      column4

16 jan 1994       _alia1        22        chennai 
17 jan 1994       _alia2        22        chennai 
18 jan 1994       _alia3        22        chennai 
19 jan 1994       _alia4        22        chennai

Underscores means spaces. so there is only one leading space before the data in column 2 and the position of the space is shown above.
and i want to remove space from the second column to make it look like below:
Code:
column1          column2     column3      column4

16 jan 1994       alia1        22        chennai 
17 jan 1994       alia2        22        chennai 
18 jan 1994       alia3        22        chennai 
19 jan 1994       alia4        22        chennai
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