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regexcsvvi

Susbtitute an indeterminate number of semicolons but not one only

I have a malformed CSV file with many lines similar to:

a;b;c;d;e;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;^M

I am struggling to find the right regular expression to use in my Vi editor to eliminate the multiple contiguous semicolons (there are many more on each row) and the DOS ^M and obtain just the clean data such as

a;b;c;d;e;
Solution

  • First, you need to remove the trailing semi-colons with

    :%s/;\+$//g

    Then, run this to convert line breaks to LF:

    ::set ff=unix

    And save the file:

    :w