Reformat a large text file into one line strings (via BASH)

Question

File1:

hello
- dictionary definitions:
hi
hello
hallo
greetings
salutations
no more hello for you
-
world
- dictionary definitions:
universe
everything
the globe
the biggest tree
planet
cess pool of organic life
-

I need to format this (for a huge list of words) into a term to definition format (one line per term). How can one achieve this? None of the words are the same, only the structure seen above is. The resultant file would look something like this:

hello    - dictionary definitions:    hi    hello    hallo    greetings    salutations    no more hello for you    -
world    - dictionary definitions:    universe    everything    the globe    the biggest tree    planet    cess pool of organic life    -

Awk/Sed/Grep/Cat are the usual contenders.

Answer 1

Not sure the scripting language you will be using, pseudo code here:

for each line
 if line is "-"
  create new line
 else
  append separator to previous line
  append line to previous line
 end if
end for loop

Answer 2

awk 'BEGIN {FS="\n"; RS="-\n"}{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) printf("%s   ",$i); if($1)print"-";}' dict.txt

outputs:

hello   - dictionary definitions:   hi   hello   hallo   greetings   salutations   no more hello for you   -
world   - dictionary definitions:   universe   everything   the globe   the biggest tree   planet   cess pool of organic life   -

Answer 3

A perl one-liner:

perl -pe 'chomp;s/^-$/\n/;print " "' File1

gives

 hello - dictionary definitions: hi hello hallo greetings salutations no more hello for you
 world - dictionary definitions: universe everything the globe the biggest tree planet cess pool of organic life

This is 'something like' your required output.

Answer 4

Try this one liner works on a conditions that theer will always be 6 lines for a word

sed 'N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;s/\n/ /g' test_3

Answer 5

and who says only Perl can do it elegantly ? :)

$ gawk -vRS="-\n" '{gsub(/\n/," ")}1' file
hello - dictionary definitions: hi hello hallo greetings salutations no more hello for you
world - dictionary definitions: universe everything the globe the biggest tree planet cess pool of organic life

OR

# gawk 'BEGIN{RS="-\n";FS="\n";OFS=" "}{$1=$1}1'  file
hello - dictionary definitions: hi hello hallo greetings salutations no more hello for you
world - dictionary definitions: universe everything the globe the biggest tree planet cess pool of organic life

Answer 6

sed -ne'1{x;d};/^-$/{g;s/\n/ /g;p;n;x;d};H'
awk -v'RS=\n-\n' '{gsub(/\n/," ")}1'