[GLLUG] tr

[Melson, Paul]

I've got a large data file that I need to parse and, for some strange reason, the software that created it replaced each newline character with a printable '\n'.  Fields containing this string need to be rewritten without it for both processing and aesthetic reasons.  I'm leery of using sed because of the "no newlines in search/replace functions" rule and weirdness related to that, so I've been trying to work with `tr`.  According to my understanding of its syntax, this should work:

tr -s '\134\156' '\040' < dumpfile.txt > newfile.txt

In this instance, tr uses the octal values for '\' and 'n' and replaces them with the octal value for ' ' (space).  It does what it should do - replaces each '\n' with a ' ', but it's also matching on each 'n' and replacing it with a ' ', which causes a whole new set of problems.

It seems to me that someone must've run across something like this in the past.  Ideas, suggestions, and slaps upside the head are all appreciated.  Anybody?

Thanks in advance,
PaulM