awk delete newline after other replacements

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Dear All,

could you please help me to remove \n characters after all other replacements have been done as in the code below:

{

#remove punctuation and starting whitespaces
  gsub("[[:punct:]]"," ");
  $1=$1;
}
{
#print lines containing 'whatever'
  if ($1=="whatever")
  {print}
#print lines longer then 150 chars 
 else if (length($0) > 150)
  {print}
}
{
#does not work - need to get rid of all \n and then replace 'whatever' with \n
gsub("[\n]"," ");
{print}
}

Thank you for your great expertise.

2

You might have hit the side of the box, this is a line oriented tool. Do you want to merge some lines or remove all linefeeds? Command "tr -d '\12'" removes all linefeeds.

3

Thank you. I wanted to go AWK only and figured out to put -ORS " " to remove newline chars from output. This is a partial solution, thought.

4

Both awk and sed can read the next line or additional lines into the buffer so you can evaluate if you want to preserve the linfeed between those lines. I once wrote a sed to take whole pages and turn them into lines by reversing the new line and form feed. Then another sed could turn the pages into insert statements. Finally, I turned the form feeds back into new lines, so the displayed page from the db would be correct. The DB allowed 32k char().