Removing PATTERN from txt without removing lines and general text formatting

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1

Hi Everybody! First post! Totally noobie.

I'm using the terminal to read a poorly formatted book.
The text file contains, in the middle of paragraphs, hyphenation to split words that are supposed to be on multiple pages. It looks ve -- ry much like this.
I was hoping to use

grep -v " -- " file.txt >> newfile.txt

to clean up the file, but, of course, grep removes whole lines.

How would you go about removing these tokens without removing the whole line?

And, people of the forum do you have any other tips and tricks for formatting text files for better viewing in the terminal without using a text editor?

2

The obvious simple solution is:

sed 's/ -- //' file.txt > newfile.txt

Is there some reason why your grep command was appending to newfile.txt instead of overwriting it?

3

It is very likely that there will be more than one occurrence of -- per line, thus I added a "g" for global replacement. Just in case.

4

Thank you!
Also, I was using append >> to create a completely new file with the result.
I'm pretty noob !

How do I add to that Thank count you guys have?

5

You can use the "thumb up/thanks" button at the bottom right corner for posts that you find useful..

6

Hi AxeHandle,
In both of the file redirections:

command > file
command >> file

if file did not exist beforehand, it will be created and the output written to standard output by command will be sent to file . If file did exist, the operator > will cause the current contents to be discarded before the data written by command is written to file while the operator >> will leave the current contents of file unchanged and will append the data written by command to the end of the previous contents of file .

In the bottom right corner of any post that you did not write and that you have not already thanked, there is a button with a hand with a thumb up and the word "Thanks". If you press that button, you will be adding your thanks to the person who submitted that post.

junior-helper,
The way I read the 1st post in this thread, I thought the hyphenation was added when a word was split across a page boundary in the original text of the book. I assumed that there wouldn't be more than one page break on a single line (so the g flag wouldn't be needed), but adding the g flag certainly wouldn't hurt.