CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexlinuxsednewline
mat tharion
mat tharion

Reputation: 21

Convert text files to single line

I tried to look for this but couldn't find anything that would suit me. My problem is that i need to convert content of multiple files that have the extension .txt to one line, for example:

1
2
3
4

I would like to convert to 1234 or 1 2 3 4.

I also have subfolders that I would like to be included. I tried multiple attempts with Linux, and even tried TextCrawler 3 for Windows, but nothing really helped me.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2449

Answers (3)

Jasen
Jasen

Reputation: 12432

Remove all line breaks from the files in *.txt

sed -z -i 's/\n//g' *.txt

Convert all line breaks to spaces in *.txt

sed -z -i 's/\n/ /g' *.txt

but for subdirectories you need some help from find.

find -name "*.txt" -exec sed -z -i 's/\n/ /g' {} ';'

Upvotes: 0

Benjamin W.
Benjamin W.

Reputation: 52441

To remove newlines or replace them with spaces:

$ paste -s -d '' infile
1234
$ paste -s -d ' ' infile
1 2 3 4

This only prints to stdout. To change the file in place:

$ paste -s -d ' ' infile > infile.tmp && mv infile.tmp infile
$ cat infile
1 2 3 4

To do this for many files, for example all .txt files in the current folder and all subfolders:

$ find -name '*.txt' -exec bash -c 'paste -s -d " " {} > {}.tmp && mv {}.tmp {}' \;

This is not very elegant as it creates a subshell in the exec part, but when there is redirection in the exec part of find, that's a way to do it.

Upvotes: 1

pfnuesel
pfnuesel

Reputation: 15350

Try translate:

cat *.txt | tr -d '\n'

-d means to delete all newline \n characters.

If you want to have the space, you can do

cat *.txt | tr '\n' ' '

Upvotes: 1

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