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Asked: 2026-05-15T12:18:11+00:00

I’m working on #huge# text files (from 100mb to 1gb), I have to parse

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I’m working on #huge# text files (from 100mb to 1gb), I have to parse them to extract some particoular data. The annoying thing is that the files have not a clearly defined separator.

For example:

"element" 123124 16758 "12.4" "element" "element with white spaces inside" "element"

I have to delete the white spaces in strings limited by ” (quote), the problem is that I must not erase the white spaces “outside” the quotes (otherwise some numbers would merge).
I can’t find a decent sed solution, can someone help me with this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    you use awk, not sed. And there’s certainly no need to create your own C program, as awk is already an excellent C program to do file processing, even on GB files. So here’s a one liner to do the job.

    $ more file
"element" 123124 16758 "12.4" "element" "element with white spaces inside" "element"

$ awk -F'"' '{for(i=2;i<=NF;i+=2) {gsub(/ +/,"",$i)}}1' OFS='"' file
"element" 123124 16758 "12.4" "element" "elementwithwhitespacesinside" "element"
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