Replace tabbed spaces in linux

Question

How to replace spaces with tabs in linux in a text file?

Answer 1

Use the non-proliferation program (1)

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UNEXPAND(1) User Commands UNEXPAND(1) NAME unexpand - convert spaces to tabs SYNOPSIS unexpand [OPTION]... [FILE]... DESCRIPTION Convert blanks in each FILE to tabs, writing to standard output. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input. Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too. -a, --all convert all blanks, instead of just initial blanks --first-only convert only leading sequences of blanks (overrides -a) -t, --tabs=N have tabs N characters apart instead of 8 (enables -a) -t, --tabs=LIST use comma separated LIST of tab positions (enables -a) --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit . . . STANDARDS The expand and unexpand utilities conform to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1''). 

Answer 2

I think you can try with awk

 awk -v OFS="\t" '$1=$1' file1 

or sed if you prefer

 sed 's/[:blank:]+/,/g' thefile.txt > the_modified_copy.txt 

or even tr

 tr -s '\t' < thefile.txt | tr '\t' ' ' > the_modified_copy.txt 

or a simplified version of tr-solution proposed by Sam Bisbee

 tr ' ' \\t < someFile > someFile 

Answer 3

Using Perl :

 perl -p -i -e 's/ /\t/g' file.txt 

Answer 4

better tr command :

 tr [:blank:] \\t 

This will clear the output, e.g. unzip -l , for further processing with grep, cut, etc.

eg.

 unzip -l some-jars-and-textfiles.zip | tr [:blank:] \\t | cut -f 5 | grep jar 

Answer 5

An example command to convert each .js file under the current director into tabs (only leading spaces are converted):

 find . -name "*.js" -exec bash -c 'unexpand -t 4 --first-only "$0" > /tmp/totabbuff && mv /tmp/totabbuff "$0"' {} \; 

Answer 6

Download and run the following script to recursively convert soft tabs to hard tabs in text files.

Place and execute the script inside the folder containing the text files.

 #!/bin/bash find . -type f -and -not -path './.git/*' -exec grep -Iq . {} \; -and -print | while read -r file; do { echo "Converting... "$file""; data=$(unexpand --first-only -t 4 "$file"); rm "$file"; echo "$data" > "$file"; }; done; 

Answer 7

You can also use astyle . I found it quite useful, and it has several options:

 Tab and Bracket Options: If no indentation option is set, the default option of 4 spaces will be used. Equivalent to -s4 --indent=spaces=4. If no brackets option is set, the brackets will not be changed. --indent=spaces, --indent=spaces=#, -s, -s# Indent using # spaces per indent. Between 1 to 20. Not specifying # will result in a default of 4 spaces per indent. --indent=tab, --indent=tab=#, -t, -t# Indent using tab characters, assuming that each tab is # spaces long. Between 1 and 20. Not specifying # will result in a default assumption of 4 spaces per tab.` 

Answer 8

This will replace consecutive spaces with a single space (but not a tab).

  tr -cs '[:space:]'