I have an input which looks like this:
1
2
3
4
5
6
And I want to transform it with sed to :
12
345
6
I know it can be easily done with other tools but I want to do it specifically with sed as a learning exercise.
I have attempted this:
sed ':x ; /^ *$/{ N; s/\n// ; bx; }'
But it prints :
123456
Can someone help me fix this?
Quoting from the GNU sed manual:
A common technique to process blocks of text such as paragraphs (instead of line-by-line) is using the following construct:
sed '/./{H;$!d} ; x ; s/REGEXP/REPLACEMENT/'
The first expression, /./{H;$!d} operates on all non-empty lines, and adds the current line (in the pattern space) to the hold space. On all lines except the last, the pattern space is deleted and the cycle is restarted.
The other expressions x and s are executed only on empty lines (i.e. paragraph separators). The x command fetches the accumulated lines from the hold space back to the pattern space. The s/// command then operates on all the text in the paragraph (including the embedded newlines).
And indeed,
sed '/./{H;$!d} ; x ; s/\n//g'
does what you want.
FWIW here's how to really do that task in UNIX:
$ awk -v RS= -v OFS= '{$1=$1}1' file
12
345
6
The above will work on any UNIX box.
A GNU awk approach:
$ awk -F"\n" '{gsub("\n","");}1' RS='\n{2,}' file
12
345
6
Note it will add a trailing newline\n after last line.
Related
Given the input:
1234
5678
9abc
defg
hijk
I'd like the output:
12345678
56789abc
9abcdefg
defghijk
There are lots of examples using sed(1) to joining a pair of lines, then the next pair after that pair and so on. But I haven't found an example that joins lines 1 with 2, 2 with 3, 3 with 4, ...
sed(1) solution preferred. Other options are less interesting - e.g., awk(1), python(1) and perl(1) implementations are fairly easy. I'm specifically stumped on a successful sed(1) incantation.
sed '1h;1d;x;G;s/\n//'
I guess it can be done some other way, but this works for me:
$ cat in
1234
5678
9abc
defg
hijk
$ sed '1h;1d;x;G;s/\n//' in
12345678
56789abc
9abcdefg
defghijk
How it works: we put first line to hold space and that's it for first line. Every line after the first - swap it with hold space, append the new hold space to the old hold space, remove newline.
This does it (now improved, thanks to potong's hint):
$ sed -n 'N;s/\n\(.*\)/\1&/;P;D' infile
12345678
56789abc
9abcdefg
defghijk
In detail:
N # Append next line to pattern space
s/\n\(.*\)/\1&/ # Make 111\n222 into 111222\n222
P # Print up to first newline
D # Delete up to first newline
The substitution makes these two lines
1111
2222
which in the pattern space look like 1111\n2222 into
11112222
2222
and the P and D print/delete the first line from the pattern space.
Notice that we never hit the bottom of the script (D starts a new loop) until the very last line, where N can't fetch a new line and would just print the last line on its own, if we didn't suppress that with -n.
Tweaking another answer (full credit to #aragaer) to handle single line input (and be more portable to bsd sed as well as gnu sed than the original version - update: that answer has been edited another way for portability):
% cat >> inputfile << eof
12
34
56
eof
% sed -e '1{$p;h;d' -e '}' -e 'x;G;s/\n//' inputfile # bsd + gnu sed [1]
1234
3456
or
% cat joinsuccessive.sed
1{
$p;h;d
}
x;G;s/\n//
% sed -f joinsuccessive.sed inputfile
1234
3456
Here's an annotated version.
1{ # special case for first line only:
$p # even MORE special case: print current line for input with
# only a single line
h # add line 1 to hold space (for joining with successive lines)
d # delete pattern space and move to next line (without printing)
}
x # for lines 2+, swap pattern space (current line) and hold space
G # add newline + hold space (now has current line) to pattern space
# (previous line) giving prev line, newline, curr line in pattern
# space (and curr line is in hold space)
s/\n// # remove newline added by G (between lines) before printing the
# pattern space
[1] bsd sed(1) wants a closing brace to be on a line by itself. Use -e to "build" the script or put the commands in a sed script file (and use -f joinsuccessive.sed).
I am in the learning phase of sed and awk commands, trying some complicated logic but couldn't get solution for the below.
File contents:
This is apple,apple.com 443,apple2.com 80,apple3.com 232,
We talk on 1 banana,banana.com 80,banannna.com 23,
take 5 grape,grape5.com 23,
When I try with
$ cat sample.txt | sed -e 's/[[:space:]][^,]*,/,/g'
,apple.com,apple2.com,apple3.com,
,banana.com,banannna.com,
,grape5.com,
is ok but I want to skip this sed for the first comma in each line, so expected output is
This is apple,apple.com,apple2.com,apple3.com,
We talk on 1 banana,banana.com,banannna.com,
take 5 grape,grape5.com,
Any help is appreciated.
If you are using GNU sed, you can do something like
sed -e 's/[[:space:]][^,]*,/,/2g' file
where the 2g specifies something like start the substitution from the 2nd occurrence and g for doing it subsequently to the rest of the occurrences.
The output for the above command.
sed -e 's/[[:space:]][^,]*,/,/2g' file
This is apple,apple.com,apple2.com,apple3.com,
We talk on 1 banana,banana.com,banannna.com,
take 5 grape,grape5.com,
An excerpt from the man page of GNU sed
g
Apply the replacement to all matches to the regexp, not just the first.
number
Only replace the numberth match of the regexp.
awk '{gsub(/[ ]+/," ")gsub(/com [0-9]+/,"com")}1' file
This is apple,apple.com,apple2.com,apple3.com,
We talk on 1 banana,banana.com,banannna.com,
take 5 grape,grape5.com,
The first gsub removes extra space and the next one takes away unwanted numbers between com and comma.
I have a text file with many empty lines between sentences. I used sed, gawk, grep but they dont work. :(. How can I do now? Thanks.
Myfile: Desired file:
a a
b b
c c
. .
d d
e e
f f
g g
. .
h
i
h j
i k
j .
k
.
You can use awk for this:
awk 'BEGIN{prev="x"}
/^$/ {if (prev==""){next}}
{prev=$0;print}' inputFile
or the compressed one liner:
awk 'BEGIN{p="x"}/^$/{if(p==""){next}}{p=$0;print}' inFl
This is a simple state machine that collapses multi-blank-lines into a single one.
The basic idea is this. First, set the previous line to be non-empty.
Then, for every line in the file, if it and the previous one are blank, just throw it away.
Otherwise, set the previous line to that value, print the line, and carry on.
Sample transcript, the following command:
$ echo '1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10' | awk 'BEGIN{p="x"}/^$/{if(p==""){next}}{p=$0;print}'
outputs:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Keep in mind that this is for truly blank lines (no content). If you're trying to collapse lines that have an arbitrary number of spaces or tabs, that will be a little trickier.
In that case, you could pipe the file through something like:
sed 's/^\s*$//'
to ensure lines with just whitespace become truly empty.
In other words, something like:
sed 's/^\s*$//' infile | awk 'my previous awk command'
To suppress repeated empty output lines with GNU cat:
cat -s file1 > file2
Here's one way using sed:
sed ':a; N; $!ba; s/\n\n\+/\n\n/g' file
Otherwise, if you don't mind a trailing blank line, all you need is:
awk '1' RS= ORS="\n\n" file
The Perl solution is even shorter:
perl -00 -pe '' file
You could do like this also,
awk -v RS="\0" '{gsub(/\n\n+/,"\n\n");}1' file
Explanation:
RS="\0" Once we set the null character as Record Seperator value, awk will read the whole file as single record.
gsub(/\n\n+/,"\n\n"); this replaces one or more blank lines with a single blank line. Note that \n\n regex matches a blank line along with the previous line's new line character.
Here is an other awk
awk -v p=1 'p=="" {p=1;next} 1; {p=$0}' file
I have a file that, occasionally, has split lines. The split is signaled by the fact that the line starts with '+' (possibly preceeded by spaces).
line 1
line 2
+ continue 2
line 3
...
I'd like join the split line back:
line 1
line 2 continue 2
line 3
...
using sed. I'm not clear how to join a line with the preceeding one.
Any suggestion?
This might work for you:
sed 'N;s/\n\s*+//;P;D' file
These are actually four commands:
N
Append line from the input file to the pattern space
s/\n\s*+//
Remove newline, following whitespace and the plus
P
print line from the pattern space until the first newline
D
delete line from the pattern space until the first newline, e.g. the part which was just printed
The relevant manual page parts are
Selecting lines by numbers
Addresses overview
Multiline techniques - using D,G,H,N,P to process multiple lines
Doing this in sed is certainly a good exercise, but it's pretty trivial in perl:
perl -0777 -pe 's/\n\s*\+//g' input
I'm not partial to sed so this was a nice challenge for me.
sed -n '1{h;n};/^ *+ */{s// /;H;n};{x;s/\n//g;p};${x;p}'
In awk this is approximately:
awk '
NR == 1 {hold = $0; next}
/^ *\+/ {$1 = ""; hold=hold $0; next}
{print hold; hold = $0}
END {if (hold) print hold}
'
If the last line is a "+" line, the sed version will print a trailing blank line. Couldn't figure out how to suppress it.
You can use Vim in Ex mode:
ex -sc g/+/-j -cx file
g global search
- select previous line
j join with next line
x save and close
Different use of hold space with POSIX sed... to load the entire file into the hold space before merging lines.
sed -n '1x;1!H;${g;s/\n\s*+//g;p}'
1x on the first line, swap the line into the empty hold space
1!H on non-first lines, append to the hold space
$ on the last line:
g get the hold space (the entire file)
s/\n\s*+//g replace newlines preceeding +
p print everything
Input:
line 1
line 2
+ continue 2
+ continue 2 even more
line 3
+ continued
becomes
line 1
line 2 continue 2 continue 2 even more
line 3 continued
This (or potong's answer) might be more interesting than a sed -z implementation if other commands were desired for other manipulations of the data you can simply stick them in before 1!H, while sed -z is immediately loading the entire file into the pattern space. That means you aren't manipulating single lines at any point. Same for perl -0777.
In other words, if you want to also eliminate comment lines starting with *, add in /^\s*\*/d to delete the line
sed -n '1x;/^\s*\*/d;1!H;${g;s/\n\s*+//g;p}'
versus:
sed -z 's/\n\s*+//g;s/\n\s*\*[^\n]*\n/\n/g'
The former's accumulation in the hold space line by line keeps you in classic sed line processing land, while the latter's sed -z dumps you into what could be some painful substring regexes.
But that's sort of an edge case, and you could always just pipe sed -z back into sed. So +1 for that.
Footnote for internet searches: This is SPICE netlist syntax.
A solution for versions of sed that can read NUL separated data, like here GNU Sed's -z:
sed -z 's/\n\s*+//g'
Compared to potong's solution this has the advantage of being able to join multiple lines that start with +. For example:
line 1
line 2
+ continue 2
+ continue 2 even more
line 3
becomes
line 1
line 2 continue 2 continue 2 even more
line 3
I would like to operate on the last 7 lines of a file with sed regardless of the filelength.
According to a related question this type of range won't work: $-6,$ {..commands..}
What is the equivalent that will?
Pipe the output of tail -7 into sed.
tail -7 test.txt | sed -e "s/e/WWW/"
More info on Pipes here.
You could just switch from sed(1) to ed(1), the commands are about the same. In this case, the command is the same, except with no limitations on address range.
$ cat > fl7.ed
ed - $1 << \eof
1,7s/$/ (one of the first seven lines)/
$-6,$s/$/ (one of the last seven lines)/
w
q
eof
$ sh fl7.ed yourfile
perl -lne 'END{print join$\,#a,"-",#b}push#a,$_ if#a<6;push#b,$_;shift#b if#b>7'
In the END{} block you can do whatever is required; #a contains the first 6, #b the last 7 lines as requested.
This should work for you:
sed '1{N;N;N;N;N};N;$s/foo/bar/g;P;D' inputfile
Explanation:
1{N;N;N;N;N} - when the first line is read, load the pattern space with five more lines (total: 6 at this point)
N - append another line
$s/foo/bar/g - when the last line is read, perform some operation on the entire contents of pattern space (the last seven lines of the file). Operations can be more complex than shown here
P - print the test before the first newline in pattern space
D - delete the text just printed and loop to the beginning of the script (the "append another line" step - the first instruction is skipped since it only applies to the first line in the file)
This might work for you:
sed ':a;1,6{$!N;ba};${s/foo/bar/g;q};N;D' file
Explanation:
Create a loop label. :a
Gather lines 1 to 6 in the pattern space (PS). 1,6{$!N;ba}
If it's the last line, process the PS and quit, therefore printing out the last seven lines. ${s/foo/bar/g;q}
If it's not the last line, append the next line to the PS. N
Delete upto the first newline and begin a new cycle without reading a new line. D