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bashawktabswhitespace
Kouber Saparev
Kouber Saparev

Reputation: 8105

Replace tab with variable amount of spaces, maintaining the alignment

I have a tab separated file, consisting of 7 columns.

ABC     1437    1       0       71      15.7    174.4
DEF     0       0       0       1       45.9    45.9
GHIJ    2       3       0       9       1.1     1.6

What I need is to replace the tab character with variable amount of space characters in order ot maintain the column alignment. Note that, I do not want every tab to be replaced by 8 spaces. Instead, I want 5 spaces after row #1 column #1 (8 - length(ABC) = 5), 4 spaces after row #1 column #2 (8 - length(1437) = 4), etc.

Is there a linux tool to do it for me, or I should write it myself?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1361

Answers (3)

Timur Shtatland
Timur Shtatland

Reputation: 12347

Use column, as suggested in the comment by anubhava, specifically using -t and -s options:

column -t -s $'\t' in_file

From the column manual:

   -s, --separator separators
          Specify the possible input item delimiters (default is
          whitespace).

   -t, --table
          Determine the number of columns the input contains and
          create a table.  Columns are delimited with whitespace, by
          default, or with the characters supplied using the
          --output-separator option.  Table output is useful for
          pretty-printing.

Upvotes: 0

Ed Morton
Ed Morton

Reputation: 203189

The POSIX utility pr called as pr -e -t does exactly what you want and AFAIK is present in every Unix installation.

$ cat file
ABC     1437    1       0       71      15.7    174.4
DEF     0       0       0       1       45.9    45.9
GHIJ    2       3       0       9       1.1     1.6

$ pr -e -t file
ABC     1437    1       0       71      15.7    174.4
DEF     0       0       0       1       45.9    45.9
GHIJ    2       3       0       9       1.1     1.6

and with the tabs visible as ^Is:

$ cat -ET file
ABC^I1437^I1^I0^I71^I15.7^I174.4$
DEF^I0^I0^I0^I1^I45.9^I45.9$
GHIJ^I2^I3^I0^I9^I1.1^I1.6$

$ pr -e -t file | cat -ET
ABC     1437    1       0       71      15.7    174.4$
DEF     0       0       0       1       45.9    45.9$
GHIJ    2       3       0       9       1.1     1.6$

Upvotes: 5

karakfa
karakfa

Reputation: 67467

There is command pair dedicated for this task.

$ expand file

will do exactly what you want. The counterpart unexpand -a to do the reverse. There are few other useful options in both.

Upvotes: 3

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