How to replace new lines with tab characters

Question

hi i have pattern like below

hi
hello
hallo
greetings
salutations
no more hello for you

i am trying to replace all new lines with tab spaces using the following command

sed -e "s_/\n_/\t_g"

but its not working . could nybody pls help? i need the solution in sed /awk.

Answer 1

Here tr is better, I think:

tr "\n" "\t" < newlines

As Nifle suggested in a comment, newlines here is the name of the file holding the original text.

Because sed is so line-oriented, it's more complicated to use in a case like this.

Answer 2

not sure about output you want

# awk -vRS="\n" -vORS="\t" '1' file
hi      hello   hallo   greetings       salutations     no more hello for you

Answer 3

You can't replace newlines on a line-by-line basis with sed. You have to accumulate lines and replace the newlines between them.

text abc\n    <- can't replace this one

text abc\ntext def\n    <- you can replace the one after "abc" but not the one at the end

This sed script accumulates all the lines and eliminates all the newlines but the last:

sed -n '1{x;d};${H;x;s/\n/\t/g;p};{H}'

By the way, your sed script sed -e "s_/\n_/\t_g" is trying to say "replace all slashes followed by newlines with slashes followed by tabs". The underscores are taking on the role of delimiters for the s command so that slashes can be more easily used as characters for searching and replacing.

Answer 4

sed '$!{:a;N;s/\n/\t/;ta}' file