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How to strip all of the text out of a text file and leave only the numbers and formatting. And other sed tricks.

How to strip all numbers out of a text stream

This is how to remove all text from the output of a file and only keep the other formatting.

homer@deep-thought ~/Desktop/b $ fortune -l | sed s/[a-z]/\ /gi;
       :                                        3:15  . .               
                                          -                    .
 
  ,                    !
		--               '84

A possibly useless but interesting use of sed. Here I am removing only the numbers from text output. This is another use of sed. The backspace in the sed regex allows us to have a space character to replace the numbers.

homer@deep-thought ~/Desktop/b $ fortune -l | sed s/[0-9]/\ /gi;
Q:	How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb?
A:	Fifteen.  One to do it, and fourteen to write document number
	GC       -    , Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility,
	of which   % of the pages state only "This page intentionally
	left blank", and   % of the definitions are of the form "A:.....
	consists of sequences of non-blank characters separated by blanks".

Here I am replacing all instances of the lowercase ‘a’ with an uppercase ‘A’.

homer@deep-thought ~/Desktop/b $ fortune -l | sed s/[a]/A/gi;
Q:	MinnesotAns Ask, "Why Aren't there more phArmAcists from AlAbAmA?"
A:	EAsy.  It's becAuse they cAn't figure out how to get the little
	bottles into the typewriter.

Here I am removing all of the ‘<' and '>‘ characters from a html file.

cat index.php | head -n 10 | sed s/[\<\>]/\/gi;

And here is the result.

homer@deep-thought ~/Documents $ cat index.php | head -n 10 | sed s/[\<\>]/\/gi;
!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"
html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en"
head
	titleSecuritron GNU/Linux pages./title
	meta name="generator" content="Vim. Debian GNU/Linux." /
	meta content="text-html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" /
	meta name="description" content="Securitron GNU/Linux pages. Help and support for Linux and UNIX users." /
	meta name="keywords" content="GNU/Linux, help, tips, code, Ubuntu, UNIX" /
	link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /

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