how to rid off leading and trailing spaces/tabs in each column? 1

[ogniemi]

a text file contains columns delimetered with "|" sign.

example:
aaaaaaaa | fffffff | cccc | ddd

how to get rid off empty leading/trailing signs in each column and get in result:

aaaaaaaa|fffffff|cccc|ddd

regards.

 

[PHV]

One way:

sed 's!^ *!!;s! *| *!|!g;s! *$!!' /path/to/input > output

Hope This Helps, PH.
FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[ogniemi]

thx but tabs are still kept....

$ echo "  ssss     |     sss\tsss\t   |ddd   |a"|sed 's!^ *!!;s! *| *!|!g;s! *$!!'
ssss|sss        sss     |ddd|a
$ echo "  ssss     |     sss\tsss\t   |\tddd   |a"|sed 's!^ *!!;s! *| *!|!g;s! *$!!'
ssss|sss        sss     |       ddd|a
$

 

[p5wizard]

Well, you'll need to specify spaces [red]or tabs[/red] in the sed commands like so

[tt]sed 's!^[ (tab)]*!!;'[/tt]

and so on. Substitute [tt]" *"[/tt] with "[tt][ (tab)]*[/tt]" in PHV's example. For sed, you'll need to type the tab character literally as it doesn't understand \t.

[xyz]* means any number of the characters inside the brackets

HTH,

p5wizard

 

[stefanwagner]

Gnu sed understands \t on linux (at least).

don't visit my homepage:

http://home.arcor.de/hirnstrom/minis/index.html

 

[p5wizard]

gnu != unix ;-)

HTH,

p5wizard