On Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 02:07:13PM -0400, David Swasey wrote:
>
> Please consider changing pr -i to use a single space, rather than a
> tab, in the case where one space is needed just before a tab stop.
> For example, I would prefer that the output of
>
> 	echo 'donttab here' | pr -ti
>
> contains no tabs.  One way to accomplish this is
>
I use "trim" which I wrote many years ago to remove trailing spaces
from text files and eventually grew to convert spaces to tabs and
viceversa.  The attached code is for Plan 9 but needs a couple of
BSDisms to compile correctly: this is the mkfile line I use:

	pcc -o trim -D_POSIX_SOURCE -D_BSD_EXTENSION trim.c

NO man(1) page, yet, but I'm working on it.  A comment of relevance to
the above:

**	A tab is never output if its purpose can be fulfilled by
**	a single space (yes, it seems odd, but it has frustrated
**	me since 1991 - it's now fixed).

Trim tries to be clever about 'C' strings and leave tabs and spaces
unchanged between quotes, but it would require a fancier syntax
scanner to be perfect :-(

++L

PS: the code is in the public domain, in the strict sense of the term.