How can I insert a tab character with sed on OS X?

Question

I have tried:

echo -e "egg\t  \t\t salad" | sed -E 's/[[:blank:]]+/\t/g'

Which results in:

eggtsalad

And...

echo -e "egg\t  \t\t salad" | sed -E 's/[[:blank:]]+/\\t/g'

Which results in:

egg\tsalad

What I would like:

egg salad

Solution 1

Try: Ctrl+V and then press Tab.

Solution 2

Use ANSI-C style quoting: $'string'

sed $'s/foo/\t/'

So in your example, simply add a $:

echo -e "egg\t  \t\t salad" | sed -E $'s/[[:blank:]]+/\t/g'

Solution 3

OSX's sed only understands \t in the pattern, not in the replacement doesn't understand \t at all, since it's essentially the ancient 4.2BSD sed left over from 1982 or thenabouts. Use a literal tab (which in bash and vim is Ctrl+V, Tab), or install GNU coreutils to get a more reasonable sed.

Solution 4

Another option is to use $(printf '\t') to insert a tab, e.g.:

echo -e "egg\t  \t\t salad" | sed -E "s/[[:blank:]]+/$(printf '\t')/g"

Solution 5

try awk

echo -e "egg\t  \t\t salad" | awk '{gsub(/[[:blank:]]+/,"\t");print}'

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