[SOLVED] Unix command to remove newline within a field

Issue

EDIT: Thank you all for answering the question, all the answers work. Stack Overflow indeed has a great community.

Receiving a flat file as a source. In one of the fields, the value is segregated into new lines, but there is a need to break the newline and combine it into a single content.

Ex: File is as below:

PO,MISC,yes,"This
is
an
example"
PO,MISC,yes,"This
is
another
example"

In the above ex, the data is being read as 9 lines, but we need the input to be read as a single line, as shown below -

PO, MISC, yes, "This is an example"
PO, MISC, yes, "This is another example"

Tried via the below syntax but did not succeed. Is there any way to achieve this? I also need to print the file contents into another file.

Syntax:

awk -v RS='([^,]+\\,){4}[^,]+\n' '{gsub(/\n/,"",RT); print RT}' sample_attachments.csv > test.csv

Solution

With your shown samples Only, please try following awk, written and tested in GNU awk. Simple explanation would be, setting RS to \"\n and setting field separator as ,. In main block Globally substituting new lines with spaces in $NF. Then using printf printing current line along with value of RT.

awk -v RS="\"\n"  'BEGIN{FS=OFS=","} {gsub(/\n/," ",$NF);printf("%s",$0 RT)}' Input_file

Answered By - RavinderSingh13

Answer Checked By - Terry (WPSolving Volunteer)