lucacerone
lucacerone

Reputation: 10119

Delete numbers at the beginning of lines

I have a file "file.txt" in which some rows begins with numbers.

E.g. file.txt:

1 bla bla 390
23 foo foo 100
# bar bar 

some word

45 junk

Is there an easy and fast way to delete the numbers (and the space) from all the lines that start with a number, while deleting only the space from the others?

I would like a command so that the file then looks like:

bla bla 390
foo foo 100
# bar bar 

some word

junk

Upvotes: 7

Views: 7090

Answers (2)

nyxee
nyxee

Reputation: 2811

this regular expression works in geany, just use replace in document

^([\d]+ +)|^( +)

it gives your desired output for the input below

1 bla bla 390
23   foo foo 100
# bar bar 

  some word

45 junk

Upvotes: 0

Donovan
Donovan

Reputation: 15917

You can use the command editor line:

:%s/^\d*//

This uses the global search %s to find any line that begins with a digit \d* and replace it with nothing //.

Additionally, if you need to remove the extra space after the number as well:

:%s/^\d* //

Upvotes: 13

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