CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shelltextfile-manipulation
Liju Thomas
Liju Thomas

Reputation: 1076

Convert vertical text into horizontal in shell

I just pondered upon this problem while executing some tasks in shell.

How can I convert a .txt file which contains text in the following format[vertical direction]:

H
e
l
l
o

W
o
r
l
d

Note: The line without any letter contains a space and EOL

I need to convert to:

Hello World

I tried the following command: cat file1.txt |tr '\n' ' ' >file2.txt

Output:

H e l l o  W o r l d

How can I proceed further? Sorry, if this question has already appeared. If so, please provide me the link to the solution or any command for the work around.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 16730

Answers (4)

Liju Thomas
Liju Thomas

Reputation: 1076

After going through all the suggestions and little bit of research, I found a solution for this, wrote a script for the same:

#!/bin/bash
#Converting text to horizontal direction

IFS=''
while read line
do
   echo -n $line
done < $1 > $2           # $1 --> file1.txt contain vertical text as mentioned in the question
echo "$(cat $2)"

Command:

$./convert.sh file1.txt file2.txt

Output:

Hello World

Upvotes: 0

MarcoS
MarcoS

Reputation: 17721

You were quite close... :-)
tr command has option -d to remove charactar classes, instead of just replacing.
So:

cat file1.txt | tr -d '\n' > file2.txt

Will just do...

UPDATE: after OP comment, this is a version which preserves empty newlines:

cat file1.txt | perl -p -i -e 's/\n(.+)/$1/' > file2.txt

Upvotes: 2

fedorqui
fedorqui

Reputation: 290155

You are replacing the new lines with spaces. Instead, remove them with -d:

$ echo "H
> e
>                   # <- there is a space here
> W
> o" | tr -d '\n'
He Wo

With a file:

tr -d '\n' < file   # there is no need to `cat`!

Problem here is that the last new line is removed, so the result is POSIXly a 0-lines file.

Upvotes: 5

P....
P....

Reputation: 18401

Sample data:

echo "$x"
H
e
l
l
o

W
o
r
l
d

Solution:

  echo "$x"  |sed 's/^$/bla/'|awk 'BEGIN{OFS="";ORS=" ";RS="bla"}{$1=$1}1'
  Hello World

Upvotes: 1

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