How to remove all white spaces from a given text file

Linux Problem Overview

I want to remove all the white spaces from a given text file. Is there any shell command available for this ? Or, how to use sed for this purpose.

I want something like below:

> $ cat hello.txt | sed ....

I tried this : cat hello.txt | sed 's/ //g' .But it removes only spaces, not tabs.

Linux Solutions

Solution 1 - Linux

$ man tr
NAME
    tr - translate or delete characters

SYNOPSIS
    tr [OPTION]... SET1 [SET2]

DESCRIPTION
   Translate, squeeze, and/or delete characters from standard 
   input, writing to standard output.

In order to wipe all whitespace including newlines you can try:

cat file.txt | tr -d " \t\n\r"

You can also use the character classes defined by tr (credits to htompkins comment):

cat file.txt | tr -d "[:space:]"

For example, in order to wipe just horizontal white space:

cat file.txt | tr -d "[:blank:]"

Solution 2 - Linux

Much simpler to my opinion:

sed -r 's/\s+//g' filename

Solution 3 - Linux

I think you may use sed to wipe out the space while not losing some infomation like changing to another line.

cat hello.txt | sed '/^$/d;s/[[:blank:]]//g'

Solution 4 - Linux

Try this:

sed -e 's/[\t ]//g;/^$/d'

(found here)

The first part removes all tabs (\t) and spaces, and the second part removes all empty lines

Solution 5 - Linux

If you want to remove ALL whitespace, even newlines:

perl -pe 's/\s+//g' file

Solution 6 - Linux

Easiest way for me:

echo "Hello my name is Donald" | sed  s/\ //g

Solution 7 - Linux

This answer is similar to other however as some people have been complaining that the output goes to STDOUT i am just going to suggest redirecting it to the original file and overwriting it. I would never normally suggest this but sometimes quick and dirty works.

cat file.txt | tr -d " \t\n\r" > file.txt

Solution 8 - Linux

Dude, Just python test.py in your terminal.

f = open('/home/hduser/Desktop/data.csv' , 'r')

x = f.read().split()
f.close()

y = ' '.join(x)
f = open('/home/hduser/Desktop/data.csv','w')
f.write(y)
f.close()

Solution 9 - Linux

This is probably the simplest way of doing it:

sed -r 's/\s+//g' filename > output
mv ouput filename

Solution 10 - Linux