Trimming fields for comma or pipe seperated file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have file like this

FileA:
abc , "helloworld" , america
def,asia, japan
ghi, africa, ipl

Output Needed:
abc,"helloworld",america
def,asia,japan
ghi,africa,ipl

I would like to implement using awk.
I want to trim each field for its leading and trailing spaces.

2

for the past 6 posts, you have been asking awk questions, so what have you tried so far? have you been reading up on awk ?

3

Hi ..
USE THIS Command

awk '{gsub(" ","",$0); print $0;}' filename
regards
Manish

4

The above script just removes spaces from any where in the line.
I like to trim each field in a comma seperated file.

I wrote the following code:

awk '{gsub("^[ ]*","",$1);gsub("^[ ]*","",$2) ;gsub("^[ ]*","",$3) print $1,$2,$3;}' filename > filename1
awk '{gsub("[ ]*$","",$1);gsub("[ ]*$","",$2) ;gsub("^[ ]*$","",$3) print $1,$2,$3;}'filename1 > filename

The problem with this code is it not versatile for different files with different number of fields.

Appreciate help on making this versatile

5

This removes the spaces except the spaces within the double quotes:

awk -F"\"" '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if(i%2)gsub(" ","",$i)}}1' OFS="\"" file

Regards

6

Thankyou Franklin52

This was what i was looking for that does triming and not with in double quotes.

Thanks again

7 
nawk -F"\"" '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if(i%2)gsub("^[ ]*","",$i);gsub("[ ]*$","",$i)}}1' OFS="\"" filetst1

Modified as the earlier version was eating away the spaces between words in a csv thanks!!

8

Sorry the above was not doing trimming properly.

This works fine

nawk -F"|" '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){gsub("^[ ]*","",$i);gsub("[ ]*$","",$i)}}1' OFS="|" filetst1