January 12, 2011

Bash string padding with SED

technology.pngI know, I mentioned a bit of this earlier, but it deserves its own post.

You can left and right pad strings in BASH with spaces using SED. You do not have to use printf or anything else (despite what everyone else says).(Derived from instructions here, which talk more about centering than padding.)

This is the important part of the code:
Left justify with string length of 80
sed -e :a -e ‘s/^.{1,80}$/& /;ta’
Right justify with string length of 80
sed -e :a -e ‘s/^.{1,80}$/ &/;ta’
Center with string length of 80.
sed -e :a -e ‘s/^.{1,80}$/ & /;ta’

blankWas this post helpful or insightful? Buy me a coffee here or here and share this post with others!

Popular posts:

  • The difference between boundaries and rules
  • Two Ways to get CMYK Separation Using GIMP Instead of Photoshop in 2022
  • Weekend Project: Whole House and Streaming Audio for Free with MPD
  • Organizing and Tiling Your Windows on #Openbox Using Only... Openbox
  • Simple Smart Playlists for MPD (that work!)
  • If there's one Nazi (or a racist) at the table...

Recent Posts

Categoriesbash linux programming

Tagscoding sed

4 Comments

  1. Pureferret
    October 18, 2011

    Would it be possible to use this technique to convert from exponential notation to decimal?

    e.g convert 1.3e-2 ->0.013

  2. steven
    October 21, 2011

    Honestly, I have no idea. I often have to use a "try, try again" approach to SED.

    I'd think AWK might be a more useful tool for that, though – and perhaps a little easier to understand.

  3. tocororo-macho
    December 8, 2011

    Thanks for your post, I have crated a small function to make it reusable for scripting.

    function padding () {
    CONTENT="${1}"; PADDING="${2}"; LENGTH="${3}"; TRG_EDGE="${4}";
    case "${TRG_EDGE}" in
    left) echo ${CONTENT} | sed -e :a -e 's/^.{1,'${LENGTH}'}$/&'${PADDING}'/;ta'; ;;
    right) echo ${CONTENT} | sed -e :a -e 's/^.{1,'${LENGTH}'}$/'${PADDING}'&/;ta'; ;;
    center) echo ${CONTENT} | sed -e :a -e 's/^.{1,'${LENGTH}'}$/'${PADDING}'&'${PADDING}'/;ta'
    esac
    return ${RET__DONE};
    }

    Usage: echo "IP Address: padding "${IP_ADDRESS}" "${PADDING}" ${LENGTH}webserver";
    Hope you find it of any use.

  4. Beatrice Prose
    June 15, 2016

    In the end, I found this post !

    Thank YOU !

Comments are closed.