How to make the cut command treat same sequental delimiters as one

Question

I m trying to extract a certain  the fourth  field from the column-based   space -adjusted text stream  I m trying to use the cut command in the following manner    cat text txt   cut -d     -f 4  Unfortunately  cut doesn t treat several spaces as one delimiter  I could have piped through awk  awk    printf  4       or sed  sed  -E  s    space       g   to collapse the spaces  but I d like to know if there any way to deal with cut and several delimiters natively

User · Accepted Answer

Try   tr -s      lt text txt   cut -d     -f4   From the tr man page    -s  --squeeze-repeats   replace each input sequence of a repeated character                         that is listed in SET1 with a single occurrence                         of that character

User · Answer

As you comment in your question  awk is really the way to go  To use cut is possible together with tr -s to squeeze spaces  as kev s answer shows   Let me however go through all the possible combinations for future readers  Explanations are at the Test section   tr   cut  tr -s      lt  file   cut -d    -f4   awk  awk   print  4   file   bash  while read -r       myfield   do    echo  forth field   myfield  done  lt  file   sed  sed -r  s              3            2   file     Tests  Given this file  let s test the commands     cat a this   is    line     1 more text this      is line    2     more text this    is line 3     more text this is   line 4            more    text   tr   cut    cut -d    -f4 a is                           it does not show what we want      tr -s      lt  a   cut -d    -f4 1 2                         this makes it  3 4     awk    awk   print  4   a 1 2 3 4   bash  This reads the fields sequentially  By using   we indicate that this is a throwaway variable as a  junk variable  to ignore these fields  This way  we store  myfield as the 4th field in the file  no matter the spaces in between them     while read -r       a    do echo  4th field   a   done  lt  a 4th field  1 4th field  2 4th field  3 4th field  4   sed  This catches three groups of spaces and no spaces with             3   Then  it catches whatever coming until a space as the 4th field  that it is finally printed with  1     sed -r  s              3            2   a 1 2 3 4

User · Answer

shortest friendliest solution  After becoming frustrated with the too many limitations of cut  I wrote my own replacement  which I called cuts for  cut on steroids    cuts provides what is likely the most minimalist solution to this and many other related cut paste problems   One example  out of many  addressing this particular question     cat text txt 0   1        2 3 0 1          2   3 4    cuts 2 text txt 2 2   cuts supports    auto-detection of most common field-delimiters in files    ability to override defaults  multi-char  mixed-char  and regex matched delimiters extracting columns from multiple files with mixed delimiters offsets from end of line  using negative numbers  in addition to start of line automatic side-by-side pasting of columns  no need to invoke paste separately  support for field reordering a config file where users can change their personal preferences great emphasis on user friendliness  amp  minimalist required typing   and much more   None of which is provided by standard cut   See also  https   stackoverflow com a 24543231 1296044  Source and documentation  free software   http   arielf github io cuts

User · Answer

This Perl one-liner shows how closely Perl is related to awk   perl -lane  print  F 3   text txt   However  the  F autosplit array starts at index  F 0  while awk fields start with  1

User · Answer

With versions of cut I know of  no  this is not possible  cut is primarily useful for parsing files where the separator is not whitespace  for example  etc passwd  and that have a fixed number of fields  Two separators in a row mean an empty field  and that goes for whitespace too

[bash] How to make the 'cut' command treat same sequental delimiters as one?

Examples related to bash

Examples related to unix

Examples related to delimiter

Examples related to cut