Awk replace comma with space If we think that this is the best question we have on removing spaces, then I would say to edit the Q to focus on that, removing the backstory and "I didn't actually have this problem" parts. and for print OFS (output field separator) use comma. The + is an extended regular expression modifier. 1 @Kyle: if you have extglob on I'm looking for a Unix command that will allow me to search/replace in a file - I need to replace all commas in a certain file with spaces. ORS=" " ##Setting value of ORS(output record separator) as space here. xargs to combine the input lines, sed to replace all spaces with commas. Set the input field separator FS to a regular expression and the output field separator ORS to a string (with the usual backslash escapes). 5. With sed, you'd either need a loop: Or use the hold space so as to be able to replace all the spaces and To strip whitespace from both the beginning and the end of each line, you can use awk gsub function to replace the regular expression ^ +| +$ which targets both leading and trailing spaces with an empty string: Output: This uses awk to reformat the space-or-tab-separated data as comma-separated. 7, swift 4, etc. Awk is treating [$1,$9] as a pseudo multi-dimensional array, and inserting its internal SUBSEP character. If awk interpreted this value in the usual way, each space character would separate fields, so two spaces in a row would make I'm trying to replace all my spaces with commas to use my file as a CSV input, here is a sample input: [Royal Gauntlets of Silvermoon] (1) Senhna 2500g [Chestguard of the Vanquished Hero] (1) Neithia 3000g [Chestguard of the Vanquished Hero] (1) Buddafly 3000g I decided to use awk, so I did. The four-argument call makes no sense, since each element of seps would simply consist of a EDIT: In general, as has been highlighted in the comments, the safe way to use an alias is to use a different name, eg awkc. Awk - replace one Editor's note: This question has a troubled edit history in that a well-meaning, but misguided edit (which introduced unrelated, "pretty" formatting relying on spaces and | chars. The thing above should affix the 35th occurrence of any number of delimiter chars - in other words, the 35th field - with the char $ - no matter how chars are in each field. Here is the command: Sed. The difference between sub and gsub is sub replaces or substitutes only the first occurrence, It has empty cells and some spaces between cells. Also, \s/\S may not be on all systems, if yours doesn't recognize it you can use a literal space, or if you want space and tab, those in a bracket expression ([]), or the [[:blank:]] character class (note that I have a problem here. How do I remove the comma on the last element, and how do I remove the space? Spent 20 minutes looking at the manual without luck. I need to do this in a script and I'm looking to avoid parsing/reading the file line by line. How can I replace the empty cells with NA and remove extra spaces? Thank you very much! if your CSV file contains spaces and commas (for example foo,"bar, baz",bar - it has two cells: foo, bar, baz and bar) it isn't easy to parse (and change) with sed or awk. Thus |/ (with a space before the vertical bar) means a space or a slash. Modified 1 year, 1 month ago. it's not awk ignored it - awk reads that as one regex's boolean outcome ( 1 / 0 ) , then numerically minus a variable named F, then string concat with a single colon (:), which means the total pattern yielded true because it's a non-empty string, thus $1 split by default space gets printed – The value returned by this call to split() is three. The single command should be effective in Awk 3. 01. I don't think it answers the question in the title: Replace comma with newline following with just a command and space. txt > output. gawk, mawk, or any other awk, they all insert spaces if you use the comma, My purpose is to remove commas between two columns and put a white space there. I have a text file that I generated of all files in a directory. field numbers starts from 1, so you need third and fourth fields. The following version posted by Rob in the An alternative approach, though possibly less efficient, involves using a for loop to echo each element of the brace expansion on a single line. Using the parameter expansion you can simply replace a string without using any external command. How to replace contents of each line depending on some formula? 0. txt don't need indicate field separator. Create an alias which sets the Field Seperator to a comma. This is documented in The GNU Awk User's Guide for example:. cat file. The lone < indicates redirection : it tells the shell to get its input for the read command from the file-like object that follows on the command line. txt Share. It has the default value of "\034" and is used to separate the parts of the indices of a multidimensional array. This (and your code) awk - replace number greater than 17 digits in a column with - 25. Just use awk:. 13 In regular expressions, | means or. The problem is that, inside the double quoted fields, is posible to also find a comma. The commas get replaced with OFS which defaults to a space. x environment. It replaces the offending commas inside quoted fields with nonprinting characters. I need to change the 5th field ("txt4 "(tst)"") and replace each occurrence of " within that field—but excluding the two outer quotes—with chr(34). For example: This,is,example,"need,delete comma",xxxx And the result should be: This,is,example,"need del h # Delete all tabs and spaces at the start of line. Remove comma using awk command with multiple record. txt a,5 b,1 c, d, tr translates one character to another character, it doesn't map to/from strings, and so it can't map a newline to a string. If you want to replace ‘4G’ with ‘LTE’ directly in the file, the command will be: awk -F, '{ gsub(/4G/, "LTE", $3); print }' service_details. So I was thinking that there must be some way to tell a comma and a space after to stay that way, and a comma without a space after to be substituted with \n. A full white space RE in awk is a little clumsy but very effective. I need to replace all spaces which exist within quotes. The sed utility uses basic regular expressions, and the I would like to replace blank spaces/white spaces in a string with commas. awk '{ $1=$1","; print $1 }' Problem is: this add a comma also on the last value, which is not what I want to achieve, and also I get a space between values. -1: Nothing new. Use two substitute commands – one to replace \n with comma, and another to fix spacing: I have the file shown below where each field is separated by a comma. SUBSEP. awk insists that you tell it that you've changed FIELDWIDTHS by calling fieldwidth_set(). The for loop goes through each field of the line, and if the field starts ^ with a double-quote, has any characters . that might result from a text paragraph (like this one), like commas and periods could also be 1) replace all spaces with new line. Or you can use set_fieldwidth(". awk '{print $1}' As pointed out in the comments, -o isn't POSIX; however both GNU and BSD have it, so it should work for most people. It will work with GNU awk as I have a file in the following format: s1,23,789 s2,25,689 and I would like to transform it into a file in the following format: s1 23 789 s2 25 689 i. awk, you can either call with either . Further, awk treats whitespace as the default field separator. A file is sent with quotes if its fields also have comma that needs to be ignored while transforming. Having trouble printing out concatenated data after using awk statement. 10. ec2-describe-snapshots -H --hide-tags | awk -f convert. Strip out double quotes and append those words to the hold space. What do I do? My best solution was to use gawk to insert spaces between the variables for you. The separator of csv fields is the comma, and some fields are inside double quotes. Trying to use sed to do it gets you an unintelligible and/or non-portable mess. , the last field should be converted to "txt4 chr(34)(tst)chr(34)". If you want to match one of the characters in the POSIX character class [:blank:], use [[:blank:]]. awk -v ORS="'," '1' file Hang on - your posted example doesn't show you replacing newlines with ', which would be: $ awk -v ORS="'," '1' file But I think it is more clear with tr. the day is sunny the the the sunny is is #empty line 2) remove empty lines. However, the columns are not separated by spaces at all, only using a single comma. With three and four arguments, split() works as just described. to separate columns) temporarily confused the issue (since reverted). GNU Awk I have a comma delimited file of major codes and descriptions. dat 20210101_NewYear'sDay 20210102_LaborDay 20210103_IndependenceDay Share. Awk supports POSIX regular expressions and, under POSIX, [[:blank:]] will match any tab or space. I want to replace all occurrences of spaces with underscores up to the first comma (only in the first field), but not replace spaces following the comma. csv text file) with a semi-colon for all fields except the first. txt > Use sed to replace the last space in each line with a comma, then remove all spaces Learn how to use awk in Linux to replace newlines: : concatenate lines, replace newlines with commas, and merge every N lines into one. txt | awk '{ gsub(/[ ]+/," "); print }' this a first line with multiple spaces this a second line with multiple spaces Wrap Up! Stack Overflow for Teams Where developers & technologists share private knowledge with coworkers; Advertising & Talent Reach devs & technologists worldwide about your product, service or employer brand; OverflowAI GenAI features for Teams; OverflowAPI Train & fine-tune LLMs; Labs The future of collective knowledge sharing; About the company The requirement is to replace the comma with TAB and remove the quotes if the file has double quotes else just replace the comma. You can subsequently override it again in your command to whateveryou like, @Underverse - I don't think that's the same thing. Parameter expansion refers to retrieving and manipulating the value that is stored in the parameter or variable. Finally, we save the result H ow to change the delimiter of a file from comma to colon? Let us consider a file with the following contents: Global, in the sense, to substitute all occurrences. ) For efficiency, fw. Open Sets in Hausdorff spaces Why do my cards suddenly look worn out? I thought I'd pipe the tail to awk and do a simple replace, however I cannot seem to escape the newline in the regex. Fixing First Comma Spacing. The safest way to put a tab is as the ASCII escape 011. awk -f <(echo '{$2=$4;print}') (Assuming you put the fieldwidth snippet into fw. Thank you! I have a file and i need to replace comma and blank space with comma and 0. txt 23 8 81a4 501 20 1000004 242236402 1 0 0 1460260387 First, you can use another character as the s/// delimiter. ,This is a new line. I have to print a column in a text file using awk. cat /tmp/test. Here is example using GNU stat: $ stat -t * 001. awk -v RS=" " '{print}' words. 2 , BSD sed , awk, tr, perl 5, python 2. Ask Question Asked 1 year, 1 month ago. Here I'm demonstrating my problem with cat instead of tail: test. For instance I have the following snippet of the file: EK ED,Elementary and (7 Replies) The mv command is then used to replace the original file with this temporary file. awk breaks the line from printing whenever it finds a space. Imagine a dataset where each field begins with unwanted whitespace: I have a delimited file that I'm trying to replace the commas with an or bar | except where the comma (and other text) is between quotes (") I know that I can replace the comma using sed 's/,/|/g' I want to replace new lines in text with coma or space but do not change the last new line. You can help awk work with data fields that contain commas (or newlines) by using a small script I wrote called csvquote. Edit - easier solution: perl -pe 's/,\n/,/' list. It's important to keep the spaces that is in some name for example. the 3rd field of the string by some different value. awk > snapshots. Viewed 1k times 2 . x on RHEL 6. Note that my real data can have many more fields than what is shown How to replace the content of a specific column with awk? I want to do something similar, however my file is tab delimited instead of space delimited. For example, the BRE "bb*" matches the second to fourth characters of the string "abbbc", and the In order to replace all newlines with spaces using awk, without reading the whole file into memory: awk '{printf "%s ", $0}' inputfile If you want a final newline: awk '{printf "%s ", $0} END {printf "\n"}' inputfile You can use a character other than space: The use of \n in a s replacement text in sed is allowed, but not mandated, by POSIX. -F, use comma as field separator (so the thing before the first comma is $1, etc) /,/ operate only on lines with a comma (this means empty lines are skipped) gsub(a,b,c) match the regular expression a, replace it with b, and do all this with the contents of c print$1","$2 print the contents of field 1, a comma, then field 2 input. . Additionally, a comma is appended to each element, and the -n flag is used with echo to eliminate the trailing newline character. As a result, the $1 variable gets the numeric value before the first 4. in the second column with a comma , as I would with sed 's/\. awk -v FIELDWIDTHS="5 2 6 2 999" -v OFS= -f fw. However, sometimes, the requirement is to replace multiple spaces with a single TAB character. 04;2,75;comment 2 2018. txt | sed -e 's/ /,/g' EN1,EN2,EN3,EN4,EN5 An advantage here is that there is no trailing comma to get rid of. In the second command, the value given to the RS variable awk ' {gsub (/,/," ");print}' This will replace commas with spaces, but awk ' {gsub (/ /,",");print}' Doesn't appear to do the reverse. Th position of these fields might change, Sample input csv, I am trying to find a command to that will allow me to replace white space (in a . e 6 white spaces between Match the start of the line ^ or a comma , and replace all matches with a plus +. 5 Specifying How Fields Are Separated ¶. How to replace commas with white spaces in a csv, but inserting a different number of space after each column? Ask Question Asked 8 years, My purpose is to remove commas between two columns and put a white space there. The output is then piped into sed to remove the last comma in the string. The 1 at the end invokes the default code-block: { print $0 }. Removing leading & trailing spaces, removing spaces from fields, and more. Otherwise, switch to the hold space, delete the first introduced newline, replace all other newlines by , , print the result and replace "tabs" with commas; encapsulate values with quotations; Assuming you name this convert. txt > modified. So in this case . – uzsolt. I use this routinely to construct regular expressions (replace spaces with |) and quick sums to pipe into bc (replace spaces with +). txt use input +1 - Replace all those " "with commas to give the same effect but look neater. Looks something like this: column1,column2,column3,column4,column5,column6 How would I print Strip off white space at the front of all lines. csv or Convert comma delimited awk '{print $3,$4;}' awk. Skip to main content Is there a way to force multiple spaces to be translated into a single comma (without turning to a tool like awk)? – Kyle Strand. txt |sort | uniq -c |sort -bnr result. 07;5,25;comment 4 2018. awk 'NF>0 {print}' words. } !NF{ ##Checking if value of awk out of the box variable named NF value is NULL here, if yes then do following. bash_aliases, then put it there. I have several columns yet only one column has quoted output containing spaces which is throwing off my columns when using column -t "UDP netprobe" "ACL allow" "ACL awk -F"[()]" '{print $2}' test. x # Now let in pattern space only tabs and spaces # at the start of line (the rest is on hold space). @user1427715: The reason yours didn't work and this one does is that sub() and gsub make the replacement in-place. Follow How to Print, when columns have spaces - awk? Hot Network Questions Suppressing default output avoids unnecessary blank lines in the comma-separated text. In the first command, the value given to the RS variable is space (" "). /\,/g' file how can I use sed or preferably awk to only apply this for the second column, so my output would look like this: 2018. Stack Overflow for Teams Where developers & technologists share private knowledge with coworkers; Advertising & Talent Reach devs & technologists worldwide about your product, service or employer brand; OverflowAI GenAI features for Teams; OverflowAPI Train & fine-tune LLMs; Labs The future of collective knowledge sharing; About the company How To Use Awk To Replace Multiple Spaces With Single Space For Each Line In A File. The command. Please see example below, any help would be gratefully received, I have spent a long time looking for a solution. If you plan to do this substitution many times you will search a solution with a good performance, but if you are going to do it only once, you will serach for a solution wich involves a command that make you feel confortable. – mikeserv We may approach the pbm in a simplified manner of building from the ground up the regexes for how the fields look: Q=\" # the quote char NQ="[^${Q}]" # a non-quote With tr, use the squeeze repeat option: $ tr -s " " < file ID Name 1 a 2 b 3 g 6 f Or you can use an awk solution: $ awk '{$2=$2};1' file ID Name 1 a 2 b 3 g 6 f When you change a field in record, awk rebuild $0, takes all field and concat them together, separated by OFS, which is a space by default. $ awk -v FS=' [[:digit:]] +' -v OFS On macOS command line, how to replace first occurrence of a space by a tab, on each line of a file? Examples of available tools on macOS: bash 3. I'll abstain from voting in the reopen queue, though. STR1=This is a string to STR1=This,is,a,string. remove white spaces followed by any till comma using sed or awk. How could I match a expression like *;*;*; and use sed with the rest of the line and replace spaces with comma? sed -e 's/ /,/g' Thanks The command s/,/ /g tells sed to replace every comma with a space. Therefore use alternative commands such as find or stat. Replace comma with space using a shell script Given the following input: Test,10. bashrc, or if ~/. eg. So far I have come with: awk 'NR>1{printf","} {printf $1} There's also xargs and sed: $ xargs <input. q tells it to quit after the first line. and rest all is same throught the record. The OP's premise is that the input is tab-delimited, even though that's not directly reflected in the sample input displayed here. or: I have a txt file and I need to replace comma with space only between quotation marks. g. 02;1,5;comment 1 2018. Yes, but the " "between $1 and $2 can be replaced by a comma (space is the default output field delimiter): print $1, $2 ",". So making all whitespace into comma is: sed s/ /,/g This will replace any single space with a single comma. "1,2,NEW,4" I managed to do this with the following command: echo "1,2,3,4" | awk -F, -v OFS=, '{$3="NEW"; print }' Now the index for the column to be replaced should be passed as a variable. * and ends $ with a double-quote It’s interesting to note that we replaced the first occurrence of a comma with a space. # This saves the text part to the hold space and # bring back the original line to the pattern space. Improve this answer. bashrc sources (includes) ~/. e. Follow Set regexp for FS: one space followed by one digit followed by one or more spaces. By setting OFS , the output field separator, to a comma and by then modifying a field's value in Assuming you really only want to correct the header, you can replace all runs of space-like characters on the 1st line with commas: $ sed '1s/[[:space:]]\{1,\}/,/g' file In the first command, the value given to the RS variable is space (" "). The for-loop runs gsub, short for globally substitute, on every other field, replacing comma (",") with nothing (""). Substitutes each space with a comma, if you need you can make a pass with the -s flag (squeeze repeats), that replaces each input sequence of a repeated character that is listed in SET1 (the blank space) with a single occurrence of that character. This replaces all spaces with comma. index=3 How can I pass this to awk? Because this won't I want to replace all dots . This command eliminates the extra blank line that appears I'm trying to replace the spaces that occur after the random; using sed. txt: John\nDoe Sara\nConnor cat test. GNU sed does it, but there are implementations that output \n literally. and fourth ($4) fields, and then prints the modified line with commas separating the fields. AWK print - replace comma with dot. txt | awk -F'\\n' '{ print $1 "\n" $2 }' Desired output: John Doe Sara Connor Actual output: John\nDoe Sara\nConnor RS (Record Separator) is a built-in awk variable. Commented Nov 6, 2013 at 21:07. How to split that with awk? The fields result from a mongo export. I read it many times but those words just don't form a meaningful sequence to me. 0. sed 's/ABC/DEF/g' It will make your command more The issue with your command, sed 's/[:blank:]+/,/g' orig. For example in my bash script, $3 calls on a string array from a . Using Parameter Expansion. : Example to replace one-or-more-spaces with one tab: cat spaced-file | sed 's/ \+/\t/g' > tabbed-file Share. s/^[\t ]+// # Exchange pattern and hold spaces. grep -o '^\S*' Awk. If gawk is invoked with --csv, then a two-argument call to split() splits the string using the CSV parsing rules as described in Working With Comma Separated Value Files. the record is 16458,99,001,"RIMOUSKI, QC",418,"N",7,EST,EDT,902 16458,99,002,"CHANDLER, To give a couple of helpful manpage references for this behaviour: Default Field Splitting explains that " "is the default value, but carries a special meaning:. I'm looking to remove all spaces in field number 1, which is before the first comma. It might say: "This is a sentence, but with a comma. Related topics Topic Replies Views Activity; Learn how to use Linux awk to remove whitespaces. When converting newlines starting from the beginning of the file, an extra space is needed after the first comma. *$//' Grep. ") to set FIELDWIDTHS to a new value. I can't seem to get the awk, sed, and tr examples I've found to handle the repeating spaces very well. 1. awk provides one more function for substitution: sub. You can use any POSIX-compliant awk. The syntax is as follows: $ sed 's/$/ NEW_WORD_HERE/' input $ sed 's/$/ NEW_WORD_HERE/' input > output Help the sed not working for me. 190. /{ ##Checking condition here if any line starts from a digit(all together) and with a dot if yes then do following. 1 the sunny is is 1 the day is sunny the the How do I merge above 2 scripts into 1 line of code to produce expected result? The -F" instructs awk to do field-splitting on double-quote characters, this means that every other field will be the inter-quote text. 10 "80,22,3306" connect My solution is based on the posted input sample and desired output. Commented Mar 12 awk ' /^[0-9]+\. awk. ,,And this is also a new line. txt result. txt I need to add two fields to a csv file. The following worked for me: awk -F, '{ print $1,$2 }' n64215_my_file_name. txt > log_new_file_name. That will squeeze sequences of space and tabs (and possibly other blank characters I'd like to replace all the whitespace between the columns with one comma. 09;1,25;comment 7. – Adding text to end of each line. awk {'print $5" "$1'}. txt if the text is in a file. Put the alias in ~/. Use sed 's/^\|,/+/g' result. txt $ cat Double double quotes ("") are used to embed double quotes in quoted fields, and your second field is not quoted (due to the spaces). csv Insert a space before the first comma in a csv file. I know of this question: How to replace newlines with tab characters? - but it does produce an tab on end instead of new line. In the second command, the value given to the RS variable is a new line character or space ('[\n ]'). The default value of the field separator FS is a string containing a single space, " ". 10,"80,22,3306",connect I need to get below output using a bash script Test 10. If we don’t set the FS variable, awk will replace multiple whitespace characters with a single TAB character: $ awk -v OFS="\t" '{$1=$1; print}' input. I want to change field 3. 120. Learn how to use awk in Linux to replace newlines: : concatenate lines, replace To place the space between the arguments, just add " ", e. Find row containing string, then return that row and all following rows of text file with awk Thanks for the grep example, which pointed me to where to find the answer: The POSIX spec says: If the pattern permits a variable number of matching characters and thus there is more than one such sequence starting at that point, the longest such sequence is matched. sed 's:ABC:DEF:g' is equivalent for. – Of course, tr has better performance than sed, but the main reason I have for loving Unix is that there're many ways to do something. The “//” denotes the parameter substitution within the Change the output field separator OFS to a null (empty) string and change $2 to _: $ awk -v OFS= '{ $2="_" }1' *. In this example, we’re replacing each space with a TAB character. I'd like to use this file as input into a script that I have, but I need the text file to be formatted in a particular way to be parsed correctly. That should prefix the 35th char on an input line w/ the char $ - delimited or not. txt > Stack Overflow for Teams Where developers & technologists share private knowledge with coworkers; Advertising & Talent Reach devs & technologists worldwide about your product, service or employer brand; OverflowAI GenAI features for Teams; OverflowAPI Train & fine-tune LLMs; Labs The future of collective knowledge sharing; About the company If you need to manipulate text in Linux, the awk command is at your service. Removing the spaces (creating a quoted field) yields "one""two""t33" after reformatting with csvformat, which looks correct to me. If you need to, you can later restore those commas - but in this case, you don't need to. However it is not recommended to parse output of ls command, since it's not reliable and output is for humans, not scripts. The field separator, which is either a single character or a regular expression, controls the way awk splits an input record into fields. With it, you can squeeze the spaces and then replace each one of them with a comma: $ tr -s ' ' < file | tr ' ' ',' SNP,A1,A2,FRQ Replace new lines with spaces using awk. By using the//with the${string}syntax you can replace string. In the examples that follow, we use the bullet symbol (•) to represent Hi, i want to replace comma by space for specified field in record, i mean i want to replace the commas in the 4th field by space. Remove Whitespace from the Beginning of Each Field. awk scans the input record for character sequences that match the separator; the fields themselves are the text between the matches. If there is the possibility that your input might have tabs as well as spaces, try: $ awk -F'[[:blank:]]|/' '{print $2}' file 10. The assignment $1=$ is needed to rebuild the line Now I want to replace, e. The subscript separator. sed 's/\s. " You can use sed to replace a number of spaces with a tab. yml file. I. File 1 with double quotes: It tells awk to split the records on commas -- noting that this will break if any of your fields contains a comma! -- and using OFS to tell the print statement to recombine the fields with commas. txt is twofold: The [:blank:] is a bracketed expression matching one of the characters :, a, b, k, l, or n. vlbob dnehq keykuz fbcrt mqjc qorwqg ywpdu dhahvh vpka ohliziu rez bjmb tjf qcqc ctep