Formatting File

[Sanjay Tailor]

Hello,

I have an ASCII flat file which has a lot of white space ( spaces ) in between the fields. The field separators are quoted comma ( "," ). How can I remove these spaces between the field separators using something like sed, awk or tr?
A specific example or answer would be nice.

Thanks,
Sanjay.

[James R. Ferguson]

Sanjay:

You can "squeeze" multiple blanks down to one with 'tr'. For example"

# echo "xxx yyy zzz"|tr -s " " " "

yields "xxx yyy zzz"

...JRF...

[Tracey]

I use the following to remove the tilde ~ sign at the end of each ascii row:

sed "s/~$//p" INFILE > OUTFILE

[Leslie Chaim]

With tr and the -s option the second argument is not needed.

echo "aaa bbb ccc" yeilds
aaa bbb ccc
echo "aaa bbb ccc" | tr -s " " yeilds
aaa bbb ccc

[Vikas Khator]

Hi ,

Can you attach a small file so that we can get you the right solution.

[Anthony deRito · Accepted solution]

Sanjay, so you have a file called FILE1 with strings that look like this:

field1 "," field2 "," field3 "," filed4

You can use the command:

sed 's/ //g' FILE1

to yeild the output:

field1","field2","field3","filed4","

Tony

[Sanjay Tailor]

Hello Anthony,

With the suggestion from James, I got the fileds down form multiple to single spaces. I tried what you suggested using sed and it did work. Yet one of my fields is a title ( example "The Calculus Book." When I ran sed it got rid of all the spaces including the one in the title. Like I said my field separators are "," My spaces are on either sides of these. Can write something in sed to just take out the spaces here?

Thanks,

Sanjay.

[Alan Riggs]

try:

sed 's/[ ]*,[ ]*/ , /g' t

[Alan Riggs]

Or:

sed 's/[ ]*,[ ]*/,/g' t

if you want no spaces at all around the commas

[Leslie Chaim]

Sanjay,

Try this

sed -e 's/ *(",") */1/g' inpfile > outfile

[Anthony deRito]

Hmmm, I see the problem. You would not want the spaces to go away in the title of the book. Anyone else...

Tony

[Sanjay Tailor]

Hello All,

I tried what Anthony suggested and got the spaces removed everywhere. I then tried:
sed 's/ "," /","/g' file1 > file2

And it worked!!! This seems to be the format I am looking for.

Thank you.
Sanjay.