How to delete whitespaces in columns?

Question

I want to filter some columns of a file, it has 46 in total. I only want to filter from the 25 until the 46, by the next way:

Desired Output:

Column25 Column26 ... Column47
Column25 Column26 ... Column47
Column25 Column26 ... Column47

I have the correct command with awk:

cat -n <(awk '{n=17;if(NR==1)n=25;for(i=n;i<=NF;i++) a[$i]++} END{for(val in a) print val,a[val]}' filelog.txt)

The command above, takes from the 25 column until the last one, in this case is the 47. It works properly, prints all the strings in all the fields I want.

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But there is a problem here:

The columns I would like to print have whitespaces like the next way:

Column25 Column26     ...    Column47
Column25 Column26    [...]   Column47
[:space:]Column26  [:space:] Column47
[:space:][:space:] [:space:] [:space:]
Column25 [:space:] [:space:] [:space:]

The problem is: When I print all specific columns, the strings in another columns pass to the white spaces in the columns desired.

For example:

Column25           Column26             ...          Column47
Column25           Stringsofcolumn12  Manystrings Stringsofcolumn21
Stringsofcolumn23  Stringsofcolumn5   ofmanycolumns Stringsofcolumn22
Column25           Stringsofcolumn16  blablabla    anothermanystrings

Are any way to delete the white spaces in the columns I would like to print, to avoid this situation?

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NOTE:

The strings of the columns, have the same text of the headers. example: if the column28 has content strings, the strings are column28 literally. But I guess that doesn't matter right now, only comment.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Is that what you want?

cat thefile | tr '\t' ' '| tr -s " " | cut -d' ' -f25-46 

Please mark as the correct answer if that solve your problem