Re: how to replace three spaces with tab

[James Miller <jamtatREMOVETHIS@mailsnare.net>]

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On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Eric Bambach wrote:

> sed 's/   /\t/' largefile.txt > largefile.edited
>
> Notice that s/(Three spaces)/(special Tab character sequence)/
>
> This will replace ALL occurances of 3 spaces in your file. Make sure you dont
> have 3 spaces in any other context or those will be changed too. It will
> output to a new file in case i didnt get it right ;)

Thanks for that command line tip, Eric. Meantime, I discovered that xedit 
tells you, in it's search-and-replace routine, how to enter a tab 
sequence: you hit ctrl-q and then tab while you're in the field where you 
input the replacement text. This seems to have worked quite well. Why 
xedit, of all editors, should have this feature? Dunno. Are there yet 
other ways of doing this?

Thanks, James

>
> On Thursday 02 June 2005 05:11 pm, James Miller wrote:
>> Here's another example of what looks like something that should be fairly
>> straightforward but which I've been struggling with for at least an hour
>> and cannot find an answer. I ran into this before and was similarly
>> stumped, so I did it all manually. This time I just want to get it done
>> and finally find out the secret, my ignorance, or whether this really is
>> one of those irresolvable riddles of (Linux) life.
>>
>> I have a document that consists of about 5,500 entries, each on its own
>> line. If this matters, it's a block file to block out advertising by
>> resolving certain domains to the localhost (127.0.0.1). In each line of
>> the file as I saved it, there are three space characters between the IP
>> and the domain name (damn that elinks browser for doing that!). For my
>> router to effectively use the file, each of those 5,500 three-space
>> sequences need to be changed to a tab sequence--like when you press the
>> tab key while typing in a document. How can I automate this?
>>
>> I know how I'd do it in Word, but I've sworn off that sorry excuse for a
>> piece of software (those guys in Redmond will be jumping with glee when
>> they read this one: man with naive open source principles walks off Linux
>> precipice). None of the Linux equivalents I've tried (Abiword, OpenOffice,
>> gedit, nano) gives any indication of how a tab character can be inserted
>> in their search-and-replace feature. There are no formatting characters to
>> select, as they call them in smarmy M$ speak. The search-and-replace
>> dialogues all understand hitting the tab key as the user wanting to move
>> to the next field, not as data entry. There's probably a simple command
>> line way to do this, but if I were adept enough at simple command line
>> stuff, I'd have found it already. Can anyone offer pointers on how to
>> automate replacement of the 5,500 three-space sequences with a tab
>> sequence?
>>
>> Thanks, James
>>
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> -- 
> ----------------------------------------
> --EB
>
>> All is fine except that I can reliably "oops" it simply by trying to read
>> from /proc/apm (e.g. cat /proc/apm).
>> oops output and ksymoops-2.3.4 output is attached.
>> Is there anything else I can contribute?
>
> The latitude and longtitude of the bios writers current position, and
> a ballistic missile.
>
>                 --Alan Cox LKML-December 08,2000
>
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