Remove special characters in a text file

Question

I have a text file which contains in each line a sql query.

For each line, I need to remove some special characters.

Expl: if I have:

select * from Users;
insert into Users values ('UR01','Kim','Director');

the result file must be match:

select * from Users
insert into Users values UR01 Kim Director

FWIW, all the solutions here will add a trailing space on each line ending in one of those chars (one can't see the space in terminal but it's there...) — don_crissti
– don_crissti, Commented Apr 8, 2015 at 13:15

choroba · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-08 09:03:18Z

3

You can use sed:

sed -e 's/[;,()'\'']/ /g;s/  */ /g' input.sql > output.txt

or, if you rather want to specify what characters to keep:

sed -e 's/[^a-zA-Z*0-9]/ /g;s/  */ /g' input.sql > output.txt

answered Apr 8, 2015 at 8:53

choroba

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FloHimself · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-08 09:30:15Z

2

Using tr:

$ tr -s "()',;" " " < data
select * from Users 
insert into Users values UR01 Kim Director

answered Apr 8, 2015 at 9:13

FloHimself

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Hackaholic · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-08 09:09:08Z

0

Using awk:

awk '{gsub(/[;(),'\'']/," "); gsub(/  */," "); print}' your_file

answered Apr 8, 2015 at 9:02

Hackaholic

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3 Answers 3