[plug] Using sed to remove \n from a text file.

[Buddrige, David]

Hi all,

I have a text file which contains records of data from which I want to
extract particular records.

For the most part, the records are one line each, with each successive line
being a new record.

However, some of the "records" are very long, and in this case, they have
been continued over to the next line by adding a "-" character at the end of
the line to indicate that the record continues on the next line.

Subsequently, you having something like this:

Record1, FieldData1, FieldData2, FieldData3
Record2, FieldData4, FieldData5, FieldData6
Record3, FieldData7-
FieldData8, FieldData9
Record 4, FieldData10, FieldData11, FieldData12
....

and so on.

What I am wanting to do is use a sed script to remove any occurence of "-\n"
and replace it with no characters at all.

By this means I hope to get those records that are split over multiple
lines, to all be on one relatively large single line that I can then grep
through, while still getting the entire record returned from grep.

To do this, I have written a sed command like this:


	sed s/-\n//g myfilename.txt > my_new_filename.txt

However, this does not seem to do what I want it to. 

Can anyone see an obvious error in this command?

thanks heaps all

David Buddrige.


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