[SOLVED] Removing Windows newlines on Linux (sed vs. awk)

Issue

Have some delimited files with improperly placed newline characters in the middle of fields (not line ends), appearing as ^M in Vim. They originate from freebcp (on Centos 6) exports of a MSSQL database. Dumping the data in hex shows \r\n patterns:

$ xxd test.txt | grep 0d0a
0000190: 3932 3139 322d 3239 3836 0d0a 0d0a 7c43

I can remove them with awk, but am unable to do the same with sed.

This works in awk, removing the line breaks completely:

awk 'gsub(/\r/,""){printf $0;next}{print}'

But this in sed does not, leaving line feeds in place:

sed -i 's/\r//g'

where this appears to have no effect:

sed -i 's/\r\n//g'

Using ^M in the sed expression (ctrl+v, ctrl+m) also does not seem to work.

For this sort of task, sed is easier to grok, but I am working on learning more about both. Am I using sed improperly, or is there a limitation?

Solution

I believe some versions of sed will not recognize \r as a character. However, you can use a bash feature to work around that limitation:

echo $string | sed $'s/\r//'

Here, you let bash replace '\r' with the actual carriage return character inside the $'...' construct before passing that to sed as its command. (Assuming you use bash; other shells should have a similar construct.)

Answered By - chepner

Answer Checked By - Terry (WPSolving Volunteer)