How to match whitespace in sed?

How can I match whitespace in sed? In my data I want to match all of 3+ subsequent whitespace characters (tab space) and replace them by 2 spaces. How can this be done?

5 Answers

The character class \s will match the whitespace characters <tab> and <space>.

For example:

$ sed -e "s/\s\{3,\}/ /g" inputFile

will substitute every sequence of at least 3 whitespaces with two spaces.

---

REMARK: For POSIX compliance, use the character class [[:space:]] instead of \s, since the latter is a GNU sed extension. See the POSIX specifications for sed and BREs

11

This works on MacOS 10.8:

sed -E "s/[[:space:]]+/ /g"

9

sed 's/[ \t]*/"space or tab"/'

5

Some older versions of sed may not recognize \s as a white space matching token. In that case you can match a sequence of one or more spaces and tabs with '[XZ][XZ]*' where X is a space and Z is a tab.

1

None of the above worked for me. Yet I found the simplest answer ever by using awk

user@~[]$ cat /tmp/file
/nospace/in/here
/this/one space
/well/seems we have spaces
user@~[]$ cat /tmp/file |awk 'NF>1'
/this/one space
/well/seems we have spaces
user@~[]$ 

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