[hadocon]

I have a rather lirge text file of the form:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
abuse
abuts
abuzz
abyes
abysm
abyss
acari
acerb
acers
ached
aches
acids
acing
acini
ackee
acmes
acned
acold
.
.
.
</BLOCKQUOTE>

I want to trun this into a file that looks like this:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
abuse abuts abuzz abyes abysm abyss acari acerb acers ached aches acids acing acini ackee acmes acned acold...
</BLOCKQUOTE>

I know this can be done with a regular expression and BBEdit. Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Thanx in advance...

[Paul McCann]

In the find field enter

[^>]\r[^<]

and in the replace field just throw in a space. Select "use grep" and you should get
what you're after (assuming there's no leading spaces on the lines in the text file).

Cheers,
Paul

[hadocon]

Originally posted by Paul McCann:
In the find field enter

[^>]\r[^<]

and in the replace field just throw in a space. Select "use grep" and you should get
what you're after (assuming there's no leading spaces on the lines in the text file).

Cheers,
Paul

I tried this in BBEdit, but it did not work. I just get the system bell when I try to do this.

Here is the actual file I am working with.

As I said, I need this ASAP, so any help would be very appreciated!

[JNI]

Originally posted by hadocon:
I tried this in BBEdit, but it did not work. I just get the system bell when I try to do this.

Here is the actual file I am working with.

As I said, I need this ASAP, so any help would be very appreciated!

That file has LF endings, not CRs. So you would need to change your regexp to replace instances of '\n'.

I find this simple kind of thing easiest to do on the command line with 'tr'. No regular expressions needed.

$ tr "\n" " " < infile > outfile

That will replace an instance of any LF to a SPACE.

edit: BTW, I checked the contents of your file with 'hexdump' on the command line. The command line is your friend, especially for any kind of ASCII text file manipulation, which a cornerstone of Unix systems.