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replacing a character with a tab

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Name: hernandez
Date: May 4, 2003 at 03:03:02 Pacific
OS: xp / korn shell
CPU/Ram: 196
Comment:

Hi,

I have some data which is comma delimited. How do I change it to be tab delimited?

I tried sed 's/,/\t/g' but it just replaced the commas with a t.



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Response Number 1
Name: nails
Date: May 4, 2003 at 09:56:34 Pacific
Reply:

Hi:

One way is to actually embed the special tab character in the sed string. In vi, this is done by pressing the control-v followed by the tab character:

sed 's/,/ /g' data.file

Obviously, you can NOT cut-and-paste such a line. Instead, consider embedding the octal value of the tab character, 011, inside the sed command:

sed 's/,/'"$(printf '\011')"'/g' data.file

Yes, the embedded quotes are important. The echo command works as well, but I prefer printf for portability:

sed 's/,/'"$(echo '\011')"'/g' data.file

Regards,


Nails



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Response Number 2
Name: hernandez
Date: May 5, 2003 at 13:19:03 Pacific
Reply:

ta very much


0

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