I have a text file with following data and each row ends with |END|.
T|somthing|something|END|T|something2|something2|END| I am tryig to replace |END| with \n new line with sed.
sed 's/\|END\|/\n/g' test.txt But it's producing wrong output like below:
T | s o m e ... But what I want is this:
T|somthing|something T|something2|something2 I also tried with tr. It didn't work either.
Use this:
sed 's/|END|/\n/g' test.txt What you attempted doesn't work because sed uses basic regular expressions, and your sed implementation has a \| operator meaning “or” (a common extension to BRE), so what you wrote replaces (empty string or END or empty string) by a newline.
\n). The question asks how to replace |END| by a newline, not by \n. The following worked fine for me:
$ sed 's/|END|/\ /g' foobar T|somthing|something T|something2|something2 Notice that I just put a backslash followed by the enter key.
\n as in @A.B.'s answer wouldn't work with some sed implementations. \| for alternation in a regexp but not \n meaning newline in an s replacement? You can use awk:
$ awk -F'\\|END\\|' '{$1=$1}1' OFS='\n' file T|somthing|something T|something2|something2 -F'\\|END\\|' set field separator to |END|OFS='\n' set ouput field separator to newline$1=$1 cause awk reconstruct $0 with OFS as field separator1 is a true value, causeawk print the whole input lineAnother possibly awk command and using its RS option would be:
awk '$1=$1' RS="\|END\|" file Will print those records (based on awk's Record Separator) which are not empty( has at least one field) to prevent printing empty lines.
Tested on this input:
T|somthing|something|END|T|something2|something2|END| Test|END| |END| Gives this output:
T|somthing|something T|something2|something2 Test That cleared all empty lines :) If you want to have newlines too, replace $1=$1 with $0 in command:
awk '$0' RS="\|END\|" file 
$1=$1 condenses sequences of blanks into one space character and returns false if the first field is 0. Doesn't make sense. You probably want awk 1 RS='\\|END\\|' or awk NF RS='\\|END\\|' or awk length RS='\\|END\\|' here. Note that a regexp RS requires gawk or mawk Another way with sed that doesn't print empty lines:
sed 's/|END|/\ /g;/^$/!P;D' infile e.g. input:
T|one|two|END|T|three|four|END| T|five|six|END|T|seven|eight|END| T|nine|ten|END|T|eleven|twelve|END| output:
T|one|two T|three|four T|five|six T|seven|eight T|nine|ten T|eleven|twelve same thing with ed:
ed -s infile <<'IN' 1,$j s/|END|/\ /g ,p q IN As mentioned here by Walter Mundt, we can achieve this using an ANSI C quoted string
sed $'s/|END|/\\\n/g' ~ $ echo 'T|somthing|something|END|T|something2|something2|END|' | sed $'s/|END|/\\\n/g' T|somthing|something T|something2|something2 ~ $ Check out the above here link for other alternatives.
You can use the following syntax as well, I'm not sure if it works on all flavours of Unix/Linux
sed 's/|END|/\'$'\n''/g' ~ $ echo 'T|somthing|something|END|T|something2|something2|END|' | sed 's/|END|/\'$'\n''/g' T|somthing|something T|something2|something2 ~ $ I had a same issue in strict posix shell I did it in two pass with a unused char
cat data.json|tr '§' '?'|sed -e 's/"[^"]":/§&/g'|tr '§' '\n' 