I'm looking to delete blank lines in a CSV file, using Perl.
I'm not too sure how to do this, as these lines aren't exactly "blank" (they're just a bunch of commas).
I'd also like to save the output as a file of the same name, overwriting the original.
How could I go about doing this?
edit: I can't use modules or any source code due to network restrictions...
You can do this using a simple Perl one-liner:
perl -i -ne 'print unless /^[,\s]*$/' <filename>
The -n flag assumes this loop around your program:
while(<>) {
print unless /^[,\s]*$/;
}
and the -i flag means inplace and modifies your input file.
Note: If you are worried about losing your data with -i, you can specify -i.bak and perl will automatically write the original file to your <filename>.bak
More of a command line hack,
perl -i -ne 'print if /[^,\r\n]/' file.csv
If you want to put it inside a shell script you can do this ...
#!/bin/sh
$(perl -i -n -e 'print $_ unless ($_ =~ /^\,+$/);' $*)
