Replacing all white spaces with commas in a 46MB text file

Question

How long should replacing all white spaces with commas take in my 46MB text file using a simple text editor such as textmate on Mac?

What exactly are you asking? Have you tried it yourself? If yes, do you think it's taking too long?
This is 46MB... I dunno about textmate, but a lot of text editors choke on files that large, textmate may not be working 100% properly.
@nimble @studiohack It is actually running since 20 minutes. That's why I'm asking. I just need some quick tip how this is usually done. Maybe some other text editor?

grawity · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-22 10:24:45Z

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Using sed from Terminal this would take a few seconds:

sed -i "s/ /,/g" bigfile

(In my test, 565786 spaces in a 46 MB binary file were replaced in 2.1 seconds.)

Vim works too (:%s/ /,/g) but was a little slower.

Edit: s/[[:space:]]/,/g to include tabs (which, I assume, you meant by "whitespace")

edited Apr 22 '11 at 10:24

answered Apr 22 '11 at 8:32

grawity
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