Replace whitespace with a comma in a text file in Linux

Question

I need to edit a few text files  an output from sar  and convert them into CSV files   I need to change every whitespace  maybe it s a tab between the numbers in the output  using sed or awk functions  an easy shell script in Linux    Can anyone help me  Every command I used didn t change the file at all  I tried gsub

User · Answer

If you want to replace an arbitrary sequence of blank characters (tab, space) with one comma, use the following:

sed 's/[\t ]+/,/g' input_file > output_file

or

sed -r 's/[[:blank:]]+/,/g' input_file > output_file

If some of your input lines include leading space characters which are redundant and don't need to be converted to commas, then first you need to get rid of them, and then convert the remaining blank characters to commas. For such case, use the following:

sed 's/ +//' input_file | sed 's/[\t ]+/,/g' > output_file

User · Answer

without looking at your input file  only a guess  awk    1  1 1  OFS       redirect to another file and rename as needed

User · Answer

This worked for me   sed -e  s  s     g  input txt  gt  gt  output csv

User · Answer

What about something like this    cat texte txt   sed -e  s  s   g   gt  texte-new txt    Yes  with some useless catting and piping   could also use  lt  to read from the file directly  I suppose -- used cat first to output the content of the file  and only after  I added sed to my command-line   EDIT   as  ghostdog74 pointed out in a comment  there s definitly no need for thet cat pipe   you can give the name of the file to sed    sed -e  s  s   g  texte txt  gt  texte-new txt   If  texte txt  is this way      cat texte txt this is a text in which I want to replace spaces by commas   You ll get a  texte-new txt  that ll look like this      cat texte-new txt this is a text in which I want to replace spaces by commas   I wouldn t go just replacing the old file by the new one  could be done with sed -i  if I remember correctly   and as  ghostdog74 said  this one would accept creating the backup on the fly    keeping might be wise  as a security measure  even if it means having to rename it to something like  texte-backup txt

User · Answer

This command should work   sed  s  s   g   lt  infile txt  gt  outfile txt   Note that you have to redirect the output to a new file  The input file is not changed in place

User · Answer

Try something like   sed  s   space      g  orig txt  gt  modified txt   The character class   space   will match all whitespace  spaces  tabs  etc    If you just want to replace a single character  eg  just space  use that only   EDIT  Actually   space   includes carriage return  so this may not do what you want  The following will replace tabs and spaces   sed  s   blank      g  orig txt  gt  modified txt   as will  sed  s   t      g  orig txt  gt  modified txt   In all of this  you need to be careful that the items in your file that are separated by whitespace don t contain their own whitespace that you want to keep  eg  two words

User · Answer

Here s a Perl script which will edit the files in-place   perl -i bak -lpe  s  s    g  files    Consecutive whitespace is converted to a single comma  Each input file is moved to  bak  These command-line options are used      -i bak edit in-place and make  bak copies -p loop around every line of the input file  automatically print the line -l removes newlines before processing  and adds them back in afterwards -e execute the perl code

User · Answer

sed can do this   sed  s   t     g  input file   That will send to the console    sed -i  s   t     g  input file   will edit the file in-place

User · Answer

tr          lt input  gt output    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   Use of squeeze repeats used to after substitute tabs   tr -s   t   lt input   tr   t       gt output

[linux] Replace whitespace with a comma in a text file in Linux

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