Text Reformatting

Text Reformatting

[Peter]

Hi,

Some text I download for printing are formatted like:

      Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the
                      issue, Iraqis worry about DU.

which adds more pages for printing.

How can I with some command, left align the text to read

Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the
issue, Iraqis worry about DU.

yet maintaining the paragraphs.

When looking at the text with a word processor they are all left aligned and 
can only be changed manually line by line.

I came up with the sausage

cat file.txt | tr -s " "  "\012" > file1.txt | fmt -u -w 105 file1.txt > 
file2.txt

This does not maintain the paragraphs, however. Can sed do it and how?

Thanks & regards
-- 
Peter

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Re: Text Reformatting

[CaT]

On Sun, May 18, 2003 at 12:11:19PM +0800, Peter wrote:
> I came up with the sausage
> 
> cat file.txt | tr -s " "  "\012" > file1.txt | fmt -u -w 105 file1.txt > 
> file2.txt
> 
> This does not maintain the paragraphs, however. Can sed do it and how?

sed -e 's/^[ 	]\+//' -e 's/[ 	]\+$//' <file.txt | fmt -u -w 105 >file1.txt

I added the 2nd regexp just to make sure there was nothing there. Tab and
a space inside the square brackets.

-- 
Martin's distress was in contrast to the bitter satisfaction of some
of his fellow marines as they surveyed the scene. "The Iraqis are sick
people and we are the chemotherapy," said Corporal Ryan Dupre. "I am
starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi.
No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him."
	- http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2479.htm
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Re: Text Reformatting

[raihan]

Hi,

> cat file.txt | tr -s " "  "\012" > file1.txt | fmt -u -w
> 105 file1.txt > file2.txt
> 
> This does not maintain the paragraphs, however. Can sed do
> it and how?

If there's a blank line between paragraphs, it should work.
Otherwise it becomes more difficult.  Try opening the file
in Vim and running the command

	ggVG

which reformats the whole file similar to fmt.  If you don't
like the result, quit without saving anything:

	:q!

Yawar
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Re: Text Reformatting

[John Kelly]

Hi,
On Sunday 18 May 2003 5:11 am, Peter wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Some text I download for printing are formatted like:
>
>       Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the
>                       issue, Iraqis worry about DU.
>
> which adds more pages for printing.
>
> How can I with some command, left align the text to read
>
> Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the
> issue, Iraqis worry about DU.
>
> yet maintaining the paragraphs.
>
I often cut and paste webpages into files and they are often munged as in the 
example you give.

My standard way of doing this is to use vi.
Open the file in vi and do:
Press <ESC> to ensure you are in command mode. 
Then type:
:%s/^\s*//
<ENTER>
If you are happy with the result, type:
ZZ 
to save the modified file
else type:
:q!
to quit without saving.


regards,

John Kelly
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Re: Text Reformatting

[Stephen Samuel]

Peter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Some text I download for printing are formatted like:
> 
>       Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the
>                       issue, Iraqis worry about DU.
> 
> which adds more pages for printing.
> 
> How can I with some command, left align the text to read
> 
> Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the
> issue, Iraqis worry about DU.
> 
> yet maintaining the paragraphs.
> 
> When looking at the text with a word processor they are all left aligned and 
> can only be changed manually line by line.
> 
> I came up with the sausage
> 
> cat file.txt | tr -s " "  "\012" > file1.txt | fmt -u -w 105 file1.txt > 
> file2.txt
> 
> This does not maintain the paragraphs, however. Can sed do it and how?
> 
> Thanks & regards

Mostly what you want to do is delete the leading spaces then reformat.
As long as paragraphs are separated by blank lines, the following should
work:

sed 's/^[ \t]+//' file | fmt -u -w105 > file2.txt


----------------------------------

Note that when you do the " tr [options] > somefile | fmt [options] somefile" ,
you're losing any advantage of using a pipe.  The output for the
tr file is redirected into somefile, and fmt is reading explicitly
from there.   The pipe is essentially unused...  Either :

tr [options]  | fmt [options]

or:

tr [options] > somefile ; fmt [options] somefile

The main difference:  The former properly uses pipes
The later simply acknowledges that the pipe really isn't being used.





-- 
Stephen Samuel +1(604)876-0426                samuel@bcgreen.com
		   http://www.bcgreen.com/~samuel/
Powerful committed communication, reaching through fear, uncertainty and
doubt to touch the jewel within each person and bring it to life.

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Re: Text Reformatting

[Peter]

Thanks Stephen,

sed 's/^[ \t]+//' file does not work, it changes nothing.


samuel@bcgreen.com said:
> Note that when you do the " tr [options] > somefile | fmt [options]
> somefile" , you're losing any advantage of using a pipe. 

Well taken tip!

Regards
-- 
Peter

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Re: Text Reformatting

[Stephen Samuel]

Peter wrote:
> Thanks Stephen,
> 
> sed 's/^[ \t]+//' file does not work, it changes nothing.
> 
> 
> samuel@bcgreen.com said:
> 
>>Note that when you do the " tr [options] > somefile | fmt [options]
>>somefile" , you're losing any advantage of using a pipe. 
> 
> 
> Well taken tip!
> 
> Regards

Grr... I forgot the backslash before the '+'   That should be:

sed 's/^[ \t]\+//' file

(you could also do
	sed 's/^[ \t]*//' file


The '+' construct is (technically) a bit more efficient -- it won't
do a  null replacement for an unindented line.  It is, however, an
extended pattern and I sometimes worry about it's portability to
older (non-gnu) versions of sed. Ha! but never mind! Even that \t
turns out not to be portable to BSD. you need to have the literal
'tab' character.  It turns out that the most portable form is:

sed 's/^[ 	]*//' file
(with a space and a tabe between the sqquare brackets).  You might
need to do a ctrl-v o get bash to accept the tab caracter.

-- 
Stephen Samuel +1(604)876-0426                samuel@bcgreen.com
		   http://www.bcgreen.com/~samuel/
Powerful committed communication, reaching through fear, uncertainty and
doubt to touch the jewel within each person and bring it to life.

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Re: Text Reformatting

[Peter]

Beautiful!
Thanks to all. sed and vim work perfect. I read up on sed and tried vim before 
posting the question. It's just remains Greek to me.

vim -ggVG gives error -G command unknown. vim -ggVg file just opens the file 
as is.

Peter said:
> Some text I download for printing are formatted like: >
>       Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the
>                       issue, Iraqis worry about DU. >
> which adds more pages for printing. >
> How can I with some command, left align the text

Regards

-- 
Peter

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Re: Text Reformatting

[Amin]

Hi,

> posting the question. It's just remains Greek to me.
> 
> vim -ggVG gives error -G command unknown. vim -ggVg file just opens the file 
> as is.

Sorry --- I should have given a little more background on
Vim.  When I said to ``run a command'', I meant open your
file in Vim (preferably from the command line):

     vim file.txt

Then, running the Vim commands.  This involves typing a
sequence of characters in quick succession, one after the
other:

	gggqG

These will hopefully format your file correctly.  If you
don't like the result, you can easily abort by typing:

      :q! [ENTER]

And by [ENTER] I mean the [ENTER] key on the keyboard.  You
might have [RETURN] or whatever.  Same effect.

Again, sorry about my earlier brevity.  You naturally
assumed Vim was a simple command-line tool like ``sed'', and
tried to pass it the command as an argument.  It is actually
a text editor.

HTH,
Yawar
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Re: Text Reformatting

[Peter]

Thanks Amin,

gggqG works; ggVG in your first mail did not work, then I tried it with :ggVG 
and got the error that it is not a command after which I tried vim ggVG file. 
Now it's all clear even so still strange.

I am well aware that vim is a text editor made somewhat easier to use now with 
gvim.

Regards
-- 
Peter

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