Remove certain characters in a text file

Question

I have a text file; its content is like below.

$ cat file.txt
[] [1]foo1 bar1
[] [2]foo2 bar2
[] [35]foo3 bar3
[] [445]foo4 bar4
[] [87898]foo5 bar5

I can successfully remove the first column using awk, but I'm unable to remove [num] characters as it is associated with the string.

I'm trying to get a output like below

$ cat file.txt
foo1 bar1 
foo2 bar2
foo3 bar3
foo4 bar4
foo5 bar5

Solution 1

$ sed 's/.*]//' file.txt | tr -s ' '
foo1 bar1
foo2 bar2
foo3 bar3
foo4 bar4
foo5 bar5

The sed removes everything on the line up to (and including) the final ], and the tr compresses multiple consecutive spaces into single spaces.

Alternatively, using only sed:

sed -e 's/.*]//' -e 's/  */ /g' file.txt

With the given input data, this produces the same output as the first pipeline.

This sed first does s/.*]// which deletes everything up to the ] (inclusive). The second expression matches ␣␣*, i.e. a space followed by zero or more spaces, and replaces these with a single space. The second expression is applied across the whole line and has the same effect as tr -s ' ', i.e. it compresses multiple consecutive spaces into single spaces.

---

Using awk:

awk -F '[][:blank:]]*' '{ print $3,$4 }' file.txt

Here, we use ] or spaces or tabs as field separators (multiples of these may separate two column, which is why we use * after the [...]). Given those separators, the wanted data is available in fields 3 and 4 on each line.

---

After the data in the question was edited to remove some spaces between the last two columns, the following will also do the job:

cut -d ']' -f 3 file.txt

alternatively just

sed 's/.*]//' file.txt

or

awk -F ']' '{ print $3 }' file.txt

Solution 2

You can use sed

$ sed -e 's/.*]//g' file
foo1 bar1
foo2 bar2
foo3 bar3
foo4 bar4
foo5 bar5

You can use `awk

$ awk -F'.*]' '{print $2}' file
foo1 bar1
foo2 bar2
foo3 bar3
foo4 bar4
foo5 bar5

Comments

[smc]

Thanks again. I think in awk, we're missing [ before [:. After adding that it works fine. Other methods also working great. If possible could you please explain me the 2nd sed method? Thanks.

[Kusalananda]

@smc There is no [ missing. The [...] contains ] and [[:blank:]]. I will add an explanation of the second sed.