Trim Function ??

markjason · #1 (**permalink**) 09-03-04, 10:00

Hi !

Is there any cmd to trim the leading and trailing spaces in fields in a file seperated with commas

if i have

1, 3 , 45 , ert , mj

then output should be
1,3,45,ert,mj

thanks
Mark.

vgersh99 · #2 (**permalink**) 09-03-04, 10:33

nawk -f mark.awk myFile.txt

here's mark.awk:

Code:

BEGIN {
  FS=OFS=","
}

function trim(str)
{
  sub("^[ ]*", "", str);
  sub("[ ]*$", "", str);
  return str
}

{
  for(i=1; i <= NF; i++)
    printf("%s%s", trim($i), (i==NF) ? "\n" : OFS);
}

ducasio · #3 (**permalink**) 09-03-04, 10:43

manualy you can do it like this:

ex file.txt <<EOF
%s/ ,/,/g <<EOF
wq <<EOF

Or inside of a script you can use sed like this:

sed -e '%s/ ,/,/g' file.txt >file.tmp
mv file.tmp file.txt

bye bye,
ducasio

vgersh99 · #4 (**permalink**) 09-03-04, 11:10

or

Code:

sed -e 's/[ ][ ]*,/,/g;s/,[ ][ ]*/,/g' myFile.txt

markjason · #5 (**permalink**) 09-03-04, 12:26

Thanks,

but for in the sed command, if my input contains strings as below then it won't work

1 , ' jason ', 3

output
1,'jason',3

i can do this with awk , but with the sed cmd is there any way to do the above

Thanks again for your answers

thanks
Mark

vgersh99 · #6 (**permalink**) 09-03-04, 13:17

I think if you try my sed solution, it should give you what I [bold]think[/bold] you want.

Internet Services

Web Development

Digital Marketing

Consumer Tech