How to trim the leading spaces of a field?

[kobewins]

I have a file with some records, each of which has 13 fields seperated by "|":

B|dbl|F0245|PDCS 123|DS0000002| 99||dbl||A||||

How can I trim the leading spaces of Field 6, before '99'? I just need 99: such as

B|dbl|F0245|PDCS 123|DS0000002|99||dbl||A||||

Thank you
David

 

[PHV]

man awk

Hope This Helps, PH.
Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884 or FAQ181-2886

 

[SamBones]

Something like...

sed 's/^ *//g;s/| */|/g' file.orig > file.fixed

 

[olded]

If you're column is numeric, the easiest way is to add 0 to the field forcing the column to numeric:

awk ' BEGIN { FS="|"; OFS="|" }
{ $6=$6+0
print $0 } ' data.file

If you want a generic solution for any field type: (Note the use of nawk cause I'm using solaris):

nawk ' BEGIN { FS="|"; OFS="|" }
{ gsub("^[ \t]*", "", $6)
print $0 } ' data.file

 

[kobewins]

Thanks for all the inputs and thoughts.

David