removing white space

accent11 · 10-05-2004, 11:16 PM

i'm really new to bourne shell

the prob is that i'm trying to concatenate columns from a table to form a .sql filename

filename=$token1"_"$token2"_"$token3"_"$token4"_"$token5.sql

the output should be a_b_c_d_e.sql

but what appears instead is a_b_c_d_e .sql

how do i get rid of that space in between?
i'm really stumped (but that's probably cos of my lack of prog skill)

paulsm4 · 10-05-2004, 11:25 PM

Hi -

What you're doing sounds perfectly reasonable: maybe "token5" has a space at the end?

Here's one workaround:

SQLFILE=`echo $token1 $token2 $token3 $token4 $token5 | awk '{print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,'.sql'}'`

'Hope that helps .. PSM

accent11 · 10-05-2004, 11:32 PM

doesn't work. but thanks for the quick reply.

i've been at this for a while now and yet, still can't figure out what causes the space.

i looked at the source and the data type is varchar(2) so we know that can't be the cause.

paulsm4 · 10-06-2004, 01:22 AM

Hi -

At the shell level, it should absolutely work.

What's this about "varchar(2)"? Could you give us a few more details about what you're doing?

thx in advance .. PSM

paulsm4 · 10-06-2004, 01:30 AM

One other suggestion: you can use "od -cx" to see what "hidden" characters might be in your string.

For example:

Code:

echo 'A C'|od -cx
0000000   A       C  \n
        2041 0a43
0000004

<= THIS EXAMPLE CREATES THE STRING WITH THE CHARACTERS 0x41 ('A'), 0x20 (' ') AND 0x43 ('C'), THEN PIPES TO "OD" TO ECHO THESE CHARACTERS IN HEX AND IN ASCII

But I'm definitely curious where these "tokens" are coming from in the first place (my previous question).

Thx in advance .. PSM