Re: joining word/ lines in a file

• Jared Still <jkstill_at_cybcon.com>

> If isn't perfect. An 'and' at the end of the line will be joined with
> the beginning of the next line, which is not right.

Don't strip the newlines, replace them with white space:

    perl -e 'undef $/; ($a=<ARGV>) =~ s/\n+/ /g; print $a' \

        [file [file...]] [<file]

i.e., slurp the input whole, replace any sequence of one-or- more newlines with a single space and spit out the result.

If the input doesn't have multiple spaces in the fields you might get better result to strip newlines followed by whitespace:

    ... ~= s/\n\s+/ /g

will take any single newline and all the whitespace that follows it and replace the result with a space.

If none of the data fields being hacked have spaces in them a further:

    $a =~ s/ +/ /g

will replace one or more literal spaces with a single space to clean things up a bit:

    ... -e 'undef $/;($a=<ARGV>) =~ s/\n+/ /g;s/ +/ /g;print $a' ...

will convert nearly anything you can give it into a nice, clean, single line.

If you want to get things neater than this see the examples in Parse::RecDescent.

--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                            +1 800 762 1582
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Author: Steven Lembark
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