How can I remove leading and trailing zeroes from numbers with sed/awk/perl?

Question

I have file like this:

pup@pup:~/perl_test$ cat numbers 
1234567891
2133123131
4324234243
4356257472
3465645768000
3424242423
3543676586
3564578765
6585645646000
0001212122
1212121122
0003232322

In the above file I want to remove the leading and trailing zeroes so the output will be like this

pup@pup:~/perl_test$ cat numbers 
1234567891
2133123131
4324234243
4356257472
3465645768
3424242423
3543676586
3564578765
6585645646
1212122
1212121122
3232322

How to achieve this? I tried sed to remove those zeroes. It was easy to remove the trailing zeroes but not the leading zeroes.

Help me.

score 8 · Answer 1 · edited Aug 16 '23 at 16:30

8

perl -pe 's/ ^0+ | 0+$ //xg' numbers

edited Aug 16 '23 at 16:30

Ωmega

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answered Sep 10 '13 at 09:20

mpapec

50,217
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rams0610 · Answer 2 · 2013-09-10T11:24:24.177

7

try this Perl:

while (<>) {     
  $_ =~ s/(^0+|0+$)//g;

  print $_;
 }
}

edited Sep 10 '13 at 11:24

answered Sep 10 '13 at 09:09

rams0610

1,041
10
8

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 17 '23 at 16:53

6

sed looking for all zeros in the beginning of the line + looking for all zeros in the end:

$ sed -e 's/^0+//' -e 's/0+$//' numbers
1234567891
2133123131
4324234243
4356257472
3465645768
3424242423
3543676586
3564578765
6585645646
1212122
1212121122
3232322

edited Aug 17 '23 at 16:53

Ωmega

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134
203

answered Sep 10 '13 at 09:08

fedorqui

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598

You should optimize your regex pattern(s). Why you use `[0]*` instead of `0+`? First, there is no need to use `[...]`, and more importantly you want one or more instances, so use `+` and not `*`. Furthermore, you may combine both patterns into one: `sed -r 's/^0+|0+$//g' numbers` – Ωmega Aug 16 '23 at 16:33
You are right, updated. (I prefer two expressions for the sake of clarity) – fedorqui Aug 17 '23 at 12:33

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 10 '13 at 10:08

3

This might work for you (GNU sed):

sed 's/^00*\|00*$//g' file

or:

 sed -r 's/^0+|0+$//g' file

answered Sep 10 '13 at 10:08

potong

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 25 '19 at 16:43

Bash example to remove trailing zeros


    # ----------------- bash to remove trailing zeros ------------------
    # decimal insignificant zeros may be removed
    # bash basic, without any new commands eg. awk, sed, head, tail
    # check other topics to remove trailing zeros
    # may be modified to remove leading zeros as well

    #unset temp1

    if [ $temp != 0 ]           ;# zero remainders to stay as a float
    then

    for i in {1..6}; do             # modify precision in both for loops

    j=${temp: $((-0-$i)):1}         ;# find trailing zeros

    if [ $j != 0 ]              ;# remove trailing zeros
    then
        temp1=$temp1"$j"
    fi
        done
    else 
        temp1=0
    fi

    temp1=$(echo $temp1 | rev)
    echo $result$temp1

    # ----------------- END CODE -----------------

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 14 '23 at 23:13

Expanding on the answer by fedorqui, this one-liner will

strip leading zeroes
strip trailing zeroes
strip a trailing decimal point if one exists and all numerals following the decimal are 0
- e.g. 1.00 -> 1 instead of 1.00 -> 1.

sed -e 's/^[0]*//' -e 's/[0]*$//' -e 's/\.$//g'

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Aug 16 '23 at 03:16

gawk ++NF FS='^0+|0+$' OFS=

mawk 'gsub("^0*|0*$",_)'   # using [*] instead of [+] here
                           # ensures all rows print

How can I remove leading and trailing zeroes from numbers with sed/awk/perl?

7 Answers7

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