How to make the 'cut' command treat same sequental delimiters as one?

Question

I'm trying to extract a certain (the fourth) field from the column-based, 'space'-adjusted text stream. I'm trying to use the `cut` command in the following manner: `cat text.txt | cut -d " " -f 4` Unfortunately, `cut` doesn't treat several spaces as one delimiter. I could have piped through awk `awk '{ printf $4; }' ` or sed `sed -E "s/[[:space:]]+/ /g"` to collapse the spaces, but I'd like to know if there any way to deal with `cut` and several delimiters natively?

Answer 1

As far as I know, you cannot coach "cut" into processing adjacent delimiter char as a single delimiter string.

It in fact, cut will always assume the opposite - 2 adjacent delimiters represent an empty value for that "indexed" field.

Consider the following file:

1,2,3,4

2,,,4

3,,,4

4,,,4

We would tend to want "cut -f4 -d, file" to display four 4's

... and "cut -f2 -d, file" to display one 2 and 3 blanks.

Making cut "flexible" enough to optionally deal with repeated delimiters as you suggest would over-complicate a simple utility like "cut" ... (in my opinion anyway).

Yes, using awk or some combination of sed/cut is probably as good as it gets.

## See file content above ...

$ cut -f4 -d, file

4

4

4

4

$ cut -f2 -d, file

2