Replace Consecutive Blanks With a Single Blank (Continued)

In an earlier post Replace Consecutive Blanks With a Single Blank, we use SQL regexp_replace() to replace consecutive blanks with a single blank. We may also use Linux command tr to do the same before we load a text file into a database.

$ cat x.txt
hello    world!
This   is a  test .

Using "tr -s ' '" command to squeeze consecutive blanks into one.

$ cat x.txt | tr -s ' '
hello world!
This is a test .

Many Linux/Unix commands are very useful to clean up text files. I am using Windows but I installed open source Cygwin that provides a Linux environment. In another example Calculate Histogram for a Text File, we calculate the histogram using Linux commands.