awk to find spaces and replace with tabs

[missingbrain]

I have searched high and low to find a working example of how you can use awk to search for each space in a file and replace it with a tab.

E.g. input: I<sp>can't<sp>use<sp>awk<sp>very<sp>well.
output: I<tab>can't<tab>use<tab>awk<tab>very<tab>well.

Doesn't seem to difficult, but when I use \t for the tab as a replacement, awk seems to always error out.

I am looking to read in input from input.txt and send the output to output.txt

Thanks in advance.

 

[olded]

Hi:

nawk ' {
sub(&quot; &quot;, &quot;\t&quot;, $0)
print $0
}
' space.file > tab.file

I use nawk under Solaris 7. Also, see:

thread271-500232

Regards,

Ed

 

[missingbrain]

Ed,

Much obliged. For the redhat install I am using, I couldn't use nawk, but awk with the same context worked great.

Thanks

Ryan