Deleting newlines in a Range with sed

Question

How do I make this:

    TextTextText
    start
    stuff
    stuff
    stuff
    end
    start
    stuff
    end
    TextTextText

Look like this:

    startstuffstuffstuffend
    startstuffend

with sed? I tried this:

    sed -e '/start/,/end/N; s/\n//'

but it did this:

    startstuff
    stuffstuff
    endstart
    stuff
    end

It's only every second line...

Information is insufficient. Are there lines before `start` or after `end`? Is there additional whitespace before or after the text of each line? — Birei, Dec 02 '13 at 22:17

Birei · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-02T22:32:45.663

4

You can try following command:

sed -n '/start/,/end/ H; $ { g; s/\n//g; s/\(end\)/\1\n/g; p }' infile

It avoids automatic printing (-n), saves all lines between the range start and end in the hold buffer (H), and when the whole file has been processed ($), first removes all newlines characters and then adds one after each end word.

It yields:

startstuffstuffstuffend
startstuffend

edited Dec 02 '13 at 22:32

answered Dec 02 '13 at 22:26

Birei

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Thank you, I've been searching this for two days! – BadJoke Dec 02 '13 at 22:28
Actually, when i have more than 2 "start end" ranges it writes them together in 1 line... – BadJoke Dec 02 '13 at 22:38
@birei can you look this question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25947391/delete-n-characters-from-line-range-in-text-file answer here works only in range, what to change to preserve outrange lines? – josifoski Sep 20 '14 at 10:45

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 03 '13 at 06:51

0

You can use awk

awk '/start/ {f=1} f {printf $1} /end/ {f=0;print ""}' file
startstuffstuffstuffend
startstuffend

Or you can do

awk '/start/,/end/ {printf $1;if ($0~/end/) print ""}' file
startstuffstuffstuffend
startstuffend

answered Dec 03 '13 at 06:51

Jotne

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 03 '13 at 09:04

0

sed '/start/
   {
: again
   N
   s/End$/&/
   t clean
   b again
: clean
   s/\n//g
   }
' file

Concatenate also if there is not "End" but only a Start, but maybe you don't want this (problem also occur in other answer)

answered Dec 03 '13 at 09:04

NeronLeVelu

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 03 '13 at 09:16

0

sed -n '/start/{h;:l n;H;/^end$/!bl;x;s/\n//g;p}' input

answered Dec 03 '13 at 09:16

perreal

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Deleting newlines in a Range with sed

4 Answers4