Removal of unnecessary white spaces

Thursday, June 20, 2013 awk , perl 1 Comments

I have a text file which looks something like this:

1, 2, 3, "Test, Hello"
4, 5, 6, "Well, Hi There!"

You can see that there is a space after comma(,) which i feel its not needed for me. But I need that space in between the string in last field. So the output I am expecting is :

1,2,3,"Test, Hello"
4,5,6,"Well, Hi There!"

I used the below command for doing the same:

perl -lne 'if(/(.*?\")(.*)/)
          {$b=$2;$a=$1;$a=~s/,[\s]/,/g;
           print "$a$b"}' your_file

explanation:

(.*?\")(.*)

capture thye string till " in $1 and and remaining in $2.
$2 should be obviously unchanged. so store it in $b
$1 should be changed . so store it in $a and replace all ", " with ",".

Same thing can be achieved in awk as below:

nawk -F'\"' -v OFS='\"' '{gsub(/ /,"",$1)}1' your_file