On May 18, 2010, at 12:24 AM, Steven D. Majewski wrote:

> On May 17, 2010, at 10:02 PM, jeff donovan wrote:
> 
>> Greetings
>> 
>> this is driving me nutz.
>> 
>> using 10.6, from the terminal
>> 
>> sed ' s/([\t]+)/[:]/g' tabfile > notabfile
>> 
>> trying to search and replace tabs from a file in bash. I can do it in perl, perl -pi -e 's/\t/:/g' filename but not with sed. Ive tried it from a simple cat tabfile | sed 's/\t/,/g'
>> 
>> any assistance would be helpful.
>> -j
> 
> I think for sed, it has to be an actual tab character and not the escape "\t" .
> Unfortunately, with tab completions in bash turned on, you have to either
> type: Control-V tab  to insert a literal tab, or use some other trick.
> 
> 
> This works ( using control-V tab ):
> 
> $ sed -E "s/   +/:/g"
> 1	2		3
> 1:2:3

Thanks for the feedback. yes this did work in the terminal. then i added the same line to Applescript with a do shell script. and in that case i did have to enter a regular tab.

do shell script "cat tab1 | sed -E 's/	/:/g' > tab2 "
from shell I used Command V, in applescript i used a keyboard Tab entry.

> 
> Another way to get the tab character:
> 
> $ T=$(echo "." | tr '.' '\t' )
> 
> $ sed -E "s/${T}+/:/g"
> 1	2		3
> 1:2:3
> 
> But, as long as we're bringing up 'tr' : 'tr' has a '-s' option to reduce multiple chars
> to a single one, so:

thanks,.. i also used"tr" & "perl" it was sed that was driving me crazy. Thanks for the clarification.

> 
> $ tr -s '\t' ':'
> 1	2		3
> 1:2:3
> 
> will do the same thing with less fuss.
>