CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexbashsed
insanity
insanity

Reputation: 1178

replace a combination of string only once using sed

I have a file in which i have many spaces between the columns. I want to replace those spaces with | character but only once.

I tried like this sed -e "s/ /|/g" but it relacing evry space with | character.

My file contains

Col1  Col2  Col3 
     A     B   C
 D E    F

Actually i am fetching data from db2 using script and the output comming like this. I need to put a delimeter between the columns so that i can compare those data later.

I want output like this

Col1|Col2|Col3 
A|B|C
D|E|F

How can i resolve this. Pls help

Upvotes: 0

Views: 101

Answers (5)

insanity
insanity

Reputation: 1178

I have solved the above problem by using this

sed -e 's/[ ]\{1,\}/|/g'

Upvotes: 0

potong
potong

Reputation: 58400

This might work for you (GNU sed):

sed -r 's/^\s+//;s/\s+/|/g' file

Remove leading whitespace and replace all other whitespace by |

Upvotes: 0

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785128

An awk with OFS='|' would be simpler here:

awk -v OFS='|' '{$1=$1} 1' file
Col1|Col2|Col3
A|B|C
D|E|F

{$1=$1} is a way to tell that each record has changed thus it ends up using OFS as delimiter for rewriting records.

Upvotes: 1

Cyrbil
Cyrbil

Reputation: 6478

Match a column with space around, ignore if it is the last column.

sed -e "s/(?! *(\w+) *$)( *(\w+) *)/$2|/gm"
  • ( *(\w+) *) match a word with spaces arround (greedy)
  • ?! *(\w+) *$) Positive lookahead, ignore match that does end the line
  • $2| replace by the word followed by your delimiter

http://regexr.com/3bvrs

Actually i am fetching data from db2 using script and the output comming like this.

You might have tabs (\t) instead of spaces, its a common separator for "csv" exports. Also, if you can modify your script you can specify a delimiter for the export.

Upvotes: 1

NeronLeVelu
NeronLeVelu

Reputation: 10039

Replace multispace between data, but not for the header nor trailer space

sed -e ':redo' -e 's/\([^[:blank:]]\)[[:blank:]]\{1,\}\([^[:blank:]]\)/\1|\2/g;t redo'

Due to sed behavior(excluding already taken pattern in a g option), 2 pass are needed with this posix compliant version

Upvotes: 0

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