Replace Newlines with Sed

igor — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:03:00 +0000

This has bugged me for a while when useing TextMates ‘Filter Through Command…’ to replace all newlines in a selection. Somehow my mind always wants to use sed to do this although there are simpler ways to do it.

The following works with GNU sed but not with BSD sed on my Mac (although it should work given the documentation in the man page):

sed -n ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g;p' < infile

What this does is the following:

:a put label at the first position
N Append the next line of input to the pattern space
$!ba branch to label a, the ! tells it to apply the command to a non-selected pattern space and the $ addresses the last line of input
s/\n//g substitutes a newline with a space
p writes pattern space to standard output

If you can make this work with BSD sed please let me know.

ByteLabs: Replace Newlines with Sed

Replace Newlines with Sed