Replacing Windows CRLF with Unix LF using Perl -- `Unrecognized switch: -g`?

Question

Problem Background

We have several thousand large (10M<lines) text files of tabular data produced by a windows machine which we need to prepare for upload to a database.

We need to change the file encoding of these files from cp1252 to utf-8, replace any bare Unix LF sequences (i.e. \n) with spaces, then replace the DOS line end sequences ("CR-LF", i.e \r\n) with Unix line end sequences (i.e. \n).

The dos2unix utility is not available for this task.

We initially had a bash function that packaged these operations together using iconv and sed, with iconv doing the encoding and sed dealing with the LF/CRLF sequences. I'm trying to replace part of this bash function with a perl command.

Example Code

Based on some helpful code review, I want to change this function to a perl script.

The author of the code review suggested the following perl to replace CRLF (i.e. "\r\n") with LF ("\n").

perl -g -pe 's/(?<!\r)\n/ /g; s/\r\n/\n/g;'

The explanation for why this is better than what we had previously makes perfect sense, but this line fails for me with:

Unrecognized switch: -g  (-h will show valid options).

More interestingly, the author of the code review also suggests it is possible to perform the decode/recode in a perl script, too, but I am completely unsure where to start.

Questions

Please can someone explain why the suggested answer fails with Unrecognized switch: -g (-h will show valid options).?

If it helps, the line is supposed to receive piped input from incov as follows (though I am interested in learning how to use perl to do the redcoding/recoding step, too):

iconv --from-code=CP1252 --to-code=UTF-8 $1$ | \
perl -g -pe 's/(?<!\r)\n/ /g; s/\r\n/\n/g;' 
> "$2"

(Highly simplified) example input for testing:

apple|orange|\n|lemon\r\nrasperry|strawberry|mango|\n\r\n

Desired output:

apple|orange| |lemon\nrasperry|strawberry|mango| \n

Answer 1

Perl recently added the command line switch -g as an alias for 'gulp mode' in Perl v5.36.0.

This works in Perl version v5.36.0:

s=$(printf "Line 1\nStill Line 1\r\nLine 2\r\nLine 3\r\n")
perl -g -pe 's/(?<!\r)\n/ /g; s/\r\n/\n/g;' <<<"$s"

Prints:

Line 1 Still Line 1
Line 2
Line 3

But any version of perl earlier than v5.36.0, you would do:

perl -0777 -pe 's/(?<!\r)\n/ /g; s/\r\n/\n/g;' <<<"$s"
# same

---

BTW, the conversion you are looking for a way easier in this case with awk since it is close to the defaults.

Just do this:

awk -v RS="\r\n" '{gsub(/\n/," ")} 1' <<<"$s"
Line 1 Still Line 1
Line 2
Line 3

Or, if you have a file:

awk -v RS="\r\n" '{gsub(/\n/," ")} 1' file

This is superior to the posted perl solution since the file is processed record be record (each block of text separated by \r\n) versus having the read the entire file into memory.

(On Windows you may need to do awk -v RS="\r\n" -v ORS="\n" '...')

Another note:

You can get similar behavior from Perl by:

1. Setting the input record separator to the fixed string $/="\r\n" in a BEGIN block;
2. Use the -l switch so every line has the input record separator removed;
3. Use tr for speedy replacement of \n with ' ';
4. Possible set the output record separator, $/="\n", on Windows.

Full command:

perl -lpE 'BEGIN{$/="\r\n"} tr/\n/ /' file