How to delete one/more space using sed

[shorye]

I have following line

hello world world hello world

I am able to delete one space using following

sed 's/[ \t]//g'

and more than one space beginning of the line

sed 's/[ \t]*//g'

but when I doing this for replacing one or more space ":" in line

sed 's/[ \t]*//g'

getting following output

h:e:l:l:o:w:o:r:l:d:w:o:r:l:d:h:e:l:l:o

instead of
hello:world:world:hello:world:

please suggest

thanks

[kakariko81280]

I'm pretty sure you posted the second code snippet twice.

* means match "none or more" so your pattern will happily match nothing and insert a colon.

You'd want to use a + to indicate "one or more"

echo "hello world world hello world" | sed 's/[ \t]\+/:/g'
hello:world:world:hello:world

If this doesn't work for you, remove the \ before the +. For some reason I had to escape it when I'm pretty sure I shouldn't need to.

Let us know how you get on,

Chris...

[ghostdog74]

working with fields is much easier

# echo "hello world world hello world" | awk '{$1=$1}1' OFS=":"
hello:world:world:hello:world