jlengrand.github.io/_posts/2012-05-17-easily-change-file-separator.markdown

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layout	status	published	title	author	author_login	author_email	author_url	wordpress_id	wordpress_url	date	categories	tags	comments
post	publish	true	Easily change file separator	Julien Lengrand-Lambert	jlengrand	julien@lengrand.fr	https://www.lengrand.fr	592	https://www.lengrand.fr/?p=592	2012-05-17 15:37:56.000000000 +02:00	tips programming	bash sed separator file csv awk

You may already have found yourself in front of a huge csv file to be processed. Five minutes after having started working, you realize that you want spaces instead of commas in your file. Only problem, the file is 500 megabytes big.

Do you run Linux ? In this case, your case will be solved in 10 seconds (who said as usual ? :p).

Simply open a console and run this line

{% highlight bash %}

sed -e $"s/,/\ /g" myfile > newfile

{% endhighlight %}

or more generally,

{% highlight bash %}

sed -e $"s/old_separator/new_separator/g" myfile > newfile

{% endhighlight %}

If not, well you may want to think about switching then :)

Thanks to Frafra for the tip ;)