[nycbug-talk] Re: Simple sed question

[George Georgalis]

On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 01:16:38PM -0500, Francisco Reyes wrote:
>On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, a nice bug wrote:
>
>>Francisco:
>>>New to sed/awk.. reading a book on them.
>>>Trying to convert:
>>>### Text Text Text
>>>
>>>to
>>>###<tab>Text Text Text
>>
>>
>>echo -e "Text Text Text" |sed -e 's/\(Text Text Text\)/\t\1/g'
>>
>>Just a general example for the tab replacement part (it could have
>>many further permutations depending precisely what you need..)
>
>
>Of course it would help if I had explained that "Text Text Text" are 3 
>unknown columns and not literals. :-(
>Real data sample
>506     AllianceBer Intl PremGr B     AIPBX   8.29    -2.13   -1.54
>507     AllianceBer Intl PremGr C     AIPCX   8.29    -2.24   -1.54
>508     AllianceBer Intl PremGrAd     AIPYX   8.87    -1.88   -0.67
>509     AllianceBer Intl Val A        ABIAX   14.91   5.59    9.79
>510  AllianceBer Intl Val A    ABIAX   14.91   5.59    9.79
>511 AllianceBer Intl Val A    ABIAX   14.91   5.59    9.79
>512 AllianceBer Intl Val A    ABIAX   14.91   5.59    9.79
>
>
>Basically what I am trying to do is to have only from the description 
>onward.
>506 through 509 have a tab
>510 has 2 spaces
>511 and 512 have a single space
>
>The data is coming from OCR and basically I am cleaning it up in sed so by 
>the time I get it to awk is in good shape. I figured out all the other 
>cleanups this is the only one have not figured out. :-(

s/[ \t]*/\t/g

substitute, any combination of spaces and tabs with one tab character,
globaly across the line (untested)

// George


-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE
http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george at galis.org