how to edit a content of a document to add \n after each ;

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi:

I'm trying to write a script that reformats a given document (edit the content of a given document) , I want to add a new line \n after each ; in the document.

Regards

2

Look into: dos2unix (maybe called dos2ux on your box)

man dos2unix

turns windows text file into unix text file.

3

This also assumes you don't want a newline at the end of every line, else the above post is your answer. You didn't say if every line ended in a ';'.

sed 's/;/;<Ctrl-v><enter>/g' filename > filename.out

One way is to use the stream editor sed. Search for a ';' and replace it with a ';' followed by a <newline> on every occurrence on a line. Note pressing Ctrl-V allows one to enter a control character.

Good Luck,
Gary

1 Like
4

I've tried the script below

sed 's/;/;\\n/' testing.txt > testing2.txt

but that didn't work, the new line wasn't added after each ; in the output file (testing2.txt)

---------- Post updated at 05:46 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:26 PM ----------

This worked perfectly :b:
Thank you.

5

As you have found out, a '\n' represents a newline when used in the echo or print commands, depending on what shell you are using.

Regular expressions for pattern matching are another story.

Blue Skies,

Gary

6

The sed command above would replace only the first occurrence of ; on a line -- to replace ALL semicolons, you need to specify global replacement:

sed 's/;/;\\n/g'
7

That will replace every instance of a semicolon with a semicolon, backslash, and "n".

The portable way of including a newline in the replacement text requires preceding an actual newline character with a backslash (posix does not recognize \n in the replacement text).

sed 's/;/;\
/g'

Regards,
Alister