Text Manipulation/Replacement

[Ubence Quevedo]

On Sep 22, 2008, at 04:25 PM, NoOp wrote:

> On 09/22/2008 03:53 PM, Ubence Quevedo wrote:
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>>> From: Chris Mohler <cr33dog at gmail.com>
>>> To: "Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com 
>>> >
>>> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 3:22:43 PM
>>> Subject: Re: Text Manipulation/Replacement
>>>
>>> On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Ubence Quevedo wrote:
>>>> Hello All,
>>>>
>>>> I've used pdftotext to convert a pdf document to text and then  
>>>> used a
>>>> combination of grep and awk to single out data and replace  
>>>> formatting
>>>> that I didn't need.
>>>>
>>>> The output data eventually looks like this:
>>>> 12,123456789
>>>> ,0987654321
>>>>
>>>> But I want it to look like this:
>>>> 12,123456789,0987654321
>>>>
>>>> I've tried many different things with awk, but I can't get it  
>>>> replace \r, with
>>> just a ,
>>>
>>> Hmm - I've always had headaches dealing with newlines in sed and awk
>>> (to a lesser extent - I'm more familiar with sed).
>>>
>>> How about perl?
>>>
>>> cat foo.txt | perl -pi -e 's/\n//g'
>>>
>
>>
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>> This worked...kinda...but it ate all of the new lines, so I have  
>> one continuous line.  I need to find all instances of "\n," and  
>> replace them with ",".  That way it is very specific in what is  
>> found and replaced.  I have very little perl knowledge, and my  
>> feeble attempt at modifying the perl command above failed miserably.
>>
>> Any other ideas?
>>
>> -Ubence
>>
>
> Perhaps a silly question... can you not open the pdf in Adobe Reader  
> 8,
> then copy & paste the text to OpenOffice Writer & accomplish what  
> you want?
>
>
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If that were an option, then yes.  However, I'd prefer to keep this to  
the command line as much as possible.  I could take the output file  
and transfer it to my Mac and use TextWrangler to do what I want, but  
I'd rather not [since anyone else that might be doing this procedure  
in the future wouldn't have access to a Mac].

-Ubence