Remove white space using a Unix shell script

Question

I would like to write a shell script. It will take in a .txt file and output a .csv file.

The .txt file is a two dimensional array of text. But there is an unknown number of spaces between each entry.

So for example, the inputted file might look like:

Name    Subject   Grade
Fred English      A
James   French  B
Mark      Maths      D

And I want it to look like

Name,Subject,Grade
Fred,English,A
James,French,B
Mark,Maths,D

In pseudocode it would be:

Any ideas?

Karoly Horvath · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-04 17:18:02Z

2

You can do it in one step:

sed 's/  */,/g'

answered Oct 4, 2014 at 17:18

Karoly Horvath

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2 Comments

Why not ` +` instead of ` *`?

@MrTux It just doesn't work: + is part of so called "extended" regular expression. Would require to write sed -r 's/ +/,/' to work.

MrTux · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-04 17:19:13Z

0

It's not shell, but a perl one-liner:

perl -pi -e 's| +|,|g' filename.txt

answered Oct 4, 2014 at 17:19

MrTux

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William Pursell · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-04 17:20:43Z

0

tr -s ' ' , < input-file.txt

answered Oct 4, 2014 at 17:20

William Pursell

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