Pad all lines with spaces to a fixed width in Vim or using sed, awk, etc

Question

How can I pad each line of a file to a certain width (say, 63 characters wide), padding with spaces if need be?

For now, let’s assume all lines are guaranteed to be less than 63 characters.

I use Vim and would prefer a way to do it there, where I can select the lines I wish to apply the padding to, and run some sort of a printf %63s current_line command.

However, I’m certainly open to using sed, awk, or some sort of linux tool to do the job too.

Answer 1

Vim

:%s/.*/\=printf('%-63s', submatch(0))

Answer 2

$ awk '{printf "%-63s\n", $0}' testfile > newfile

Answer 3

In Vim, I would use the following command:

:%s/$/\=repeat(' ',64-virtcol('$'))

(The use of the virtcol() function, as opposed to the col() one, is guided by the necessity to properly handle tab characters as well as multibyte non-ASCII characters that might occur in the text.)

Answer 4

This might work for you:

$ sed -i ':a;/.\{63\}/!{s/$/ /;ba}' file

or perhaps more efficient but less elegant:

$ sed -i '1{x;:a;/.\{63\}/!{s/^/ /;ba};x};/\(.\{63\}\).*/b;G;s//\1/;y/\n/ /' file

Answer 5

Just for fun, a Perl version:

$ perl -lpe '$_ .= " " x (63 - length $_)'

Answer 6

It looks like you are comfortable using vim, but here is a pure Bash/simple-sed solution in case you need to do it from the command line (note the 63 spaces in the sed substitution):

$ sed 's/$/                                                               /' yourFile.txt |cut -c 1-63

Answer 7

With sed, without a loop:

$ sed -i '/.\{63\}/!{s/$/                                                                /;s/^\(.\{63\}\).*/\1/}' file

Be sure to have enough spaces in the 1st substitution to match the number of space you want to add.

Answer 8

Another Perl solution:

$ perl -lne 'printf "%-63s\n", $_' file