CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sed
zav
zav

Reputation: 71

How to change what sed thinks is the line delimiter

As I'm new with sed, I'm having the fun of seeing that sed doesn't think that the \r character is a valid line delimiter.

Does anyone know how to tell sed which character(s) I'd like it to use as the line delimiter when processing many lines of text?

Upvotes: 7

Views: 4347

Answers (3)

brandizzi
brandizzi

Reputation: 27060

(For making the examples below clearer and less ambiguous, I'll use the od util extensively.)

It is not possible to do with a flag, for example. I bet the best solution is the one cited by the previous answers: using tr. If you have a file such as the one below:

$ od -xc slashr.txt
0000000      6261    0d63    6564    0d66                                
           a   b   c  \r   d   e   f  \r                                
0000010

There are various ways of using tr; the one we wanted is to pass two parameters for it - two different chars - and tr will replace the first parameter by the second one. Sending the file content as input for tr '\r' '\n', we got the following result:

$ tr '\r' '\n' < slashr.txt | od -xc 
0000000      6261    0a63    6564    0a66                                
           a   b   c  \n   d   e   f  \n                                
0000010

Great! Now we can use sed:

$ tr '\r' '\n' < slashr.txt | sed 's/^./#/'
#bc
#ef
$ tr '\r' '\n' < slashr.txt | sed 's/^./#/' | od -xc
0000000      6223    0a63    6523    0a66                                
           #   b   c  \n   #   e   f  \n                                
0000010

But I presume you need to use \r as the line delimiter, right? In this case, just use tr '\n' '\r' to reverse the conversion:

$ tr '\r' '\n' < slashr.txt | sed 's/^./#/' | tr '\n' '\r' | od -xc
0000000      6223    0d63    6523    0d66                                
           #   b   c  \r   #   e   f  \r                                
0000010

Upvotes: 2

glenn jackman
glenn jackman

Reputation: 247022

You can specify it with awk's RS (record separator) variable: awk 'BEGIN {RS = "\r"} ...

Or you can convert with: tr '\r' '\n'

Upvotes: 2

sorpigal
sorpigal

Reputation: 26096

As far as I know, you can't. What's wrong with using a newline as the delimiter? If your input has DOS-style \r\n line endings it can be preprocessed to remove them and, if necessary, they can be returned afterwards.

Upvotes: -2

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