I am sure someone already sent this reply and I missed it.
Anyway, if I understand the original problem correctly, you want to
find instances of "\t\t00:00:00" and "\t\t\t\t\t\t\t00:00:00", etc. and
remove them.
I hope this is generic enough so you can change it to fit your needs:
echo "Start c 00:00:00crap here." | sed "s/\([^ ]*\)[ ]\+[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]\(.*\)/\1\2/g"
This will find an instance of "nn:nn:nn" only when preceded by more than one
tab.
Perl is easier to read, so here is a perlish version:
echo "Start c 00:00:00crap here." | {perlish} "s/([^\t]*)[\t]+\d\d:\d\d:\d\d(.*)/$1$2/g"
Troy
>
> There are oh-so-many ways, as I am sure people will tell you. regular
> expressions are the most wonderful things for such a task. I am comfortable
> with tcl, so I would read the file into a tcl variable and use 'regsub -all
> {\t700:00:00} $instring {} outstring'.
>
> There are unbelievably simple, unvbelievably fast ways to do this in one line
> from the shell using sed, but I don't speak sed. I suspect someone will hook
> you up with some basic sed.
>
> Try this in Windows. Visual Basic can use regular expressions, but you have to
> instantiate a regular expression object, then execute one of it's methods to do
> anything. Ugh.
>
> Ian
>
> Josh Berkus wrote:
>
> > Folks,
> >
> > I need to strip certain columns out of my pgdump file. However, I
> > can't figure out how to use any Unix-based tool to search-and-replace a
> > specific value which includes a tab character (e.g. replace "{TAB}7
> > 00:00:00" with "" to eliminate the column).
> >
> > RIght now, I'm copying the file to a Win32 machine and using MS Word
> > for the search-and-replace, but I'm sure there's got to be a better way
> > ... *without* learning VI or Emacs. Help?
> >
> > -Josh
> >
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