Shell Programming and Scripting

No worries . Another option may be to just adjust the field separator:

Code:

awk -F' *' '{$1=$1}1'

or perhaps a tiny tiny bit more efficient:

Code:

awk -F'  +' '{$1=$1}1' file

But what if you have a space and a TAB together? Do you leave the space or delete it?

As far as I know there are no tabs to deal with in the program, thankfully!


I ended up using this code:

Code:

awk '{gsub (/ +/, " ")}1' file

But if your code is more efficient then I could use it instead. I just don't know how to append it to the end of my script:

Code:

awk ... blah blah blah ... {print $mytexttobedespaced} ... -F' +' '{$1=$1}1'

I don't want to use another pipe, and I cannot use this at the beginning of the code as it's a job that needs to wait til the end. Either way, the previous code works well enough.

Just in case there are tabs:

Code:

awk '{gsub (/[<space><tab>]+/, " ")}1' file

Replace "<space>" and "<tab>" with literal space/tab characters when using this.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Code:

echo "This    sentence has     an undetermined    number of   spaces between 
  each word."| sed -r 's/\s+/ /g'

If one doesn't want to use bakunin's suggestion because one is afraid the someone reading the code might not notice the literal <space> or literal <tab> in the ERE (and isn't willing to add a comment noting that the characters in that ERE are a literal <space> and <tab>), one could also use:

Code:

awk '{gsub (/[[:blank:]]+/, " ")}1' file

which does the same thing in most locales and is self-documenting. And, in locales where additional characters are members of the blank character class, you might also want this global substitution to produce replacements for them as well. If your code is likely to be used in locales like this, you should seriously consider whether you want to hard code these two characters or you want to use the character class definition.