Question

I have a file that needs a semicolon delimiter after the first field, which is 4 or 5 characters in length. I tried using sed (modified a sed script I found) and it was an epic fail…it inserted semicolons between every character. I just need to add a semicolon to the end of the first field.

Here is some example text:

2A19    kRSUnicode  205.8
2FA1A   kRSUnicode  206.2
2FA1B   kRSUnicode  207.5

And the output I’m hoping for:

2A19;   kRSUnicode  205.8
2FA1A;  kRSUnicode  206.2
2FA1B;  kRSUnicode  207.5

Anyone know how to do this? Thank you!

Answer 1

Tabs and spaces are known as whitespace. This will replace the first character of whitespace with a semicolon:

sed 's/[[:space:]]/;/'
# or
sed 's/[[:space:]]/; /' # preserves the space char. 

This will replace the first instance of all whitespace with a semicolon:

sed 's/[[:space:]]\{1,\}/;/'

This will replace all instances of whitespace with a semicolon:

sed 's/[[:space:]]\{1,\}/;/g'
# or
tr '\t ' ';'