How could I remove newlines from all quoted pieces of text in a file?

Question

I have exported a CSV file from a database. Certain fields are longer text chunks, and can contain newlines. What would be the simplest way of removing only newlines from this file that are inside double quotes, but preserving all others?

I don’t care if it uses a Bash command line one liner or a simple script as long as it works.

For example,

"Value1", "Value2", "This is a longer piece
    of text with
    newlines in it.", "Value3"
"Value4", "Value5", "Another value", "value6"

The newlines inside of the longer piece of text should be removed, but not the newline separating the two rows.

Asked By: davidscolgan

||

Source

Answer 1

Here’s a solution in Python:

import re
pattern = re.compile(r'".*?"', re.DOTALL)
print pattern.sub(lambda x: x.group().replace('n', ''), text)

See it working online: ideone

Answered By: Mark Byers

Answer 2

In Python:

import csv
with open("input.csv", newline="") as input, 
        open("output.csv", "w", newline="") as output:
    w = csv.writer(output)
    for record in csv.reader(input):
        w.writerow(tuple(s.remove("n") for s in record))

Answered By: Sven Marnach

Answer 3

This is very simplistic but might work for you:

# cat <<! | sed ':a;/"$/{P;D};N;s/n//g;ba'                            
> "Value1", "Value2", "This is a longer piece
>     of text with
>     newlines in it.", "Value3"
> "Value4", "Value5", "Another value", "value6"
> !
"Value1", "Value2", "This is a longer piece    of text with    newlines in it.", "Value3"
"Value4", "Value5", "Another value", "value6"

Answered By: potong

Answer 4

Here is the adjustment of Sven’s response for Python 3 on Windows

with open(src, "rt") as input, open(dest, "wt", newline='', encoding='utf-8') as output:
w = csv.writer(output)
for record in csv.reader(input):
    w.writerow(tuple(s.replace('n', '') for s in record))

Answered By: Nereis

Answer 5

how about a perl one-liner

perl -pe 's/[^"]n//' input.csv

output

"Value1", "Value2", "This is a longer piec    of text wit    newlines in it.", "Value3"
"Value4", "Value5", "Another value", "value6"

and not to forget reformat spaces

perl -pe 's/[^"]n//; s/s+/ /' input.csv

output

"Value1", "Value2", "This is a longer piec of text wit newlines in it.", "Value3"
"Value4", "Value5", "Another value", "value6"

Answered By: Shakiba Moshiri

How could I remove newlines from all quoted pieces of text in a file?

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