How do I correct both too many and too few space characters?

Question

I have files that are edited by people other than me. They contain lines that look like this:

<E> This is text </E>

I use some Bash shell scripts do a bunch of text replacement functions on these lines of text. However, in order for the text replacements to work, the format has to be exactly correct. Most of the time they are, but of course I can't rely on the editors I'm getting these files from to not make any typos.

Part of that format is that there be one space after <E>, and one space before </E>. No more, no less. So these are all incorrect:

<E>This is text </E>
<E> This is text</E>
<E> This is text     </E>
<E>   This is text </E>

I know I can use sed to search for specific problems, like two spaces before </E> (using # instead of / since the text I'm acting on also contains / characters):

sed -i '$ s#  </E>#" </E>#g' *.txt

... but I don't know how to use it to search for an unknown number. Also, in cases where there is no space, then the character adjacent to <E> or </E> might be anything.

Bottom line, how can I search for instances of both zero spaces and of two or more spaces separated the text and <E> and </E> tags, and convert them to one space?

Answer 1

sed -e 's!<E> *!<E> !g' -e 's! *</E>! </E>!g'

(Note: I've used ! rather than # or / as my regular expression delimiter. Personal preference.)

sed can be passed more than one command to run on its input, as long as each is prefixed with the -e flag.

The * following the space in the regular expressions above means "match 0 or more space characters". The re_format man page gives more information on such repetition:

An atom followed by '*' matches a sequence of 0 or more matches of the atom. An atom followed by '+' matches a sequence of 1 or more matches of the atom. An atom followed by '?' matches a sequence of 0 or 1 matches of the atom.

where an "atom" is the sub-pattern before the *, +, or ?.

---

Running this sed command on your examples:

reedm@www:/tmp $ cat > example.txt
<E>This is text </E>
<E> This is text</E>
<E> This is text     </E>
<E>   This is text </E>
reedm@www:/tmp $ sed -e 's!<E> *!<E> !g' -e 's! *</E>! </E>!g' example.txt 
<E> This is text </E>
<E> This is text </E>
<E> This is text </E>
<E> This is text </E>

Answer 2

"at least one space" is / \+/

"zero or more spaces" is / */

"not a space" is /[^ ]/

"two or more spaces" is either /   */ or /  \+/

Answer 3

echo $STRING | tr -s " "

should eliminate multiple consecutive space characters and reduce them to a single space. Then it is up to you to decide how you want to handle that single white space.

hope this helps

Answer 4

Look at the regular expressions handled by sed(1). Under the many options you have there are \+ to repeat the preceding 1 or more times. So, sed -i -e 's; \+</E>;</E>;g' *.txt will delete any number of spaces before </E>. Look at the info manual for GNU sed (I find pinfo(1) is the nicest reader, but YMMV), the man page is definitely lacking. Under the detailed node listing check "Regular expressions".