Remove spaces from between words that are in a field

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

Is there a sed/awk cmd that will remove blank space from between words in a particular field, replacing with a single space?

Field containing 'E's in the example below:

Example input file:

AAAAA AA|BBBB|CCCCCCC|DDDDDD      |EEEE        EEEEEE|   FFF   FFFFF|

Required output:

AAAAA AA|BBBB|CCCCCCC|DDDDDD      |EEEE EEEEEE|   FFF   FFFFF|

Any help much appreciated

2

considering its 5th field..

 
awk -F"|" '{sub(/[ ]+/," ",$5);OFS=FS}1' filename
3

Excellent! Thankyou.

Is there a solution for a columnar structure rather than a delimitted structure?

input:

AAAAA AA   BBBB    CCCCCCC    DDDDDD        EEEE        EEEEEE    FFF   FFFFF

output:

AAAAA AA   BBBB    CCCCCCC    DDDDDD        EEEE EEEEEE    FFF   FFFFF
4

Unless you have a fixed length for each field, you cannot differentiate between fields.

For instance,

DDDD                 EEEEEEE

Suppose the above represent two adjacent fields, do you count the spaces after DDDD along with field 1 or as leading space for field 2. Where does field 1 end and where does field 2 start?

5

Thanks for you reply,

What if I was able to supply the start position and length of the field?

StartPos=45
Length=22
 
AAAAA AA   BBBB    CCCCCCC    DDDDDD        EEEE        EEEEEE    FFF   FFFFF

or is beyond the capability of awk / sed?

6

u can.. but bit messy though

 
awk '{v=substr($0,45,22);sub(/[ ]+/," ",v);print substr($0,0,44) v substr($0,68)}' filename
1 Like
7

Thankyou all for your help!