How to replace spaces after a certain pattern with commas? - regex

Question

I am new to coding and I'm trying to format some bioinformatics data. I am trying to remove all the spaces after GT:GL:GOF:GQ:NR:NV with commas, but not anything outside of the format xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (like the example). I know I need to use sed with regex option but I'm not very familiar with how to use it. I've never actually used sed before and got confused trying so any help would be appreciated. Sorry if I formatted this poorly (this is my first post).
EDIT 2: I got actual data from the file this time which may help solve the problem. Removed the bad example.
New Example: I pulled this data from my actual file (this is just two samples), and it is surrounded by other data. Essentially the line has a bunch of data followed by "GT:GL:GOF:GQ:NR:NV ", after this there is more data in the format shown below, and finally there is some more random data. Unfortunately I can't post a full line of the data because it is extremely long and will not fit.
Input
0/1:-1,-1,-1:146:28:14,14:4,0 0/1:-1,-1,-1:134:6:2,2:1,0
Output
0/1:-1,-1,-1:146:28:14,14:4,0,0/1:-1,-1,-1:134:6:2,2:1,0

Answer 1

With Basic Regular Expressions, you can use character classes and backreferences to accomplish your task, e.g.
$ sed 's/\([0-9][0-9]*:[0-9][0-9]*\)[ ]\([0-9][0-9]*:[0-9][0-9]*\)/\1,\2/g' file
1/0 ./. 0/1 GT:GL:GOF:GQ:NR:NV 1:12:314,213:132:13:31,14:31:31 AB GT BB
1/0 ./. 0/1 GT:GL:GOF:GQ:NR:NV 10:13:12,41:41:1:13,13:131:1:1 AB GT RT
1/0 ./. 0/1 GT:GL:GOF:GQ:NR:NV 1:12:314,213:132:13:31,14:31:31 AB GT
Which basically says:
find and capture any [0-9][0-9]* one or more digits,
separated by a :, and
followed by [0-9][0-9]* one or more digits -- as capture group 1,
match a space following capture group 1 followed by capture group 2 (which is the same as capture group 1),
then replace the space separating the capture groups with a comma reinserting the capture group text using backreference 1 and 2 (e.g. \1 and \2), finally
make the replacement global (e.g. g) to replace all matching occurrences.
Edit Based On New Input Posted
If you still need all of the original commas added, and you now want to add a comma between ,0 0/ (where there is a comma precedes a single-digit followed by the space to be replaced with a comma, followed by a single-digit and a forward-slash), then all you need to do is make your capture groups conditional (on either capturing the original data as above -or- capturing this new segment. You do that by including an OR (e.g. \| in basic regex terms) between the conditions.
For instance by adding \|,[0-9] at the end of the first capture group and \|[0-9][/] at the end of the second, e.g.
$ sed 's/\([0-9][0-9]*:[0-9][0-9]*\|,[0-9]\)[ ]\([0-9][0-9]*:[0-9][0-9]*\|[0-9][/]\)/\1,\2/g' file
0/1:-1,-1,-1:146:28:14,14:4,0,0/1:-1,-1,-1:134:6:2,2:1,0
If you have other caveats in your file, I suggest you post several complete lines of input, and if they are too long, then create a zip, gzip, bzip or xz file and post it to a site like pastebin and add the link to your question.
If all you really care about now is the space in ,0 0/, then you can shorten the sed command to:
$ sed 's/\(,[0-9]\)[[:space:]]\([0-9][/]\)/\1,\2/g' file
0/1:-1,-1,-1:146:28:14,14:4,0,0/1:-1,-1,-1:134:6:2,2:1,0
(note: I've included [[:space:]] to handle any whitespace (space, tab, ...) instead of just the literal [ ] (space) in the new example)
Let me know if this fixes the issue.

Answer 2

I'm assuming that the xx:xx:xx or xx:xx:xx:xx can have any number of parts, since some have 3, and some have 4.
This is quite difficult to do reliably with sed, as it does not support lookarounds, which seem like they might be needed for this example.
You can try something like:
perl -pe 's/(?<=\d) (?=\d+(:\d+){2,})/,/g' input.txt
If you've got your heart set on sed, you can try this, but it may miss some cases:
sed -r 's/(:[0-9]+) ([0-9]+:)/\1,\2/g' input.txt

Answer 3

Could you please try following. This will take care of printing those values also which are NOT coming in match of regex. Also we would have made regex mentioned in match a bit shorter by doing it as [0-9]+\.{4} etc since this is tested on old awk so couldn't test it.
awk '
BEGIN{
OFS=","
}
match($0,/GT:GL:GOF:GQ:NR:NV [0-9]+:[0-9]+:[0-9]+:[0-9]+:[0-9]+/){
value=substr($0,RSTART!=1?1:RSTART,RSTART+RLENGTH-1)
value1=substr($0,RSTART+RLENGTH+1)
gsub(/[[:space:]]+/,",",value1)
print value,value1
next
}
1
' Input_file

Answer 4

You may also achieve your desired result without regex, using awk:
awk '{printf "%s", $1FS$2FS$3FS$4FS$5","$6","$7; for (i=8;i<=NF;i++) printf "%s", FS$i; print ""}' input.txt
Basically, it outputs from field 1 to 5 with the default field separator ("space"), then from field 5 to 7 with the comma separator, then from field 8 onwards with default separator again.

Answer 5

perl myscript.pl '0/1:-1,-1,-1:146:28:14,14:4,0 0/1:-1,-1,-1:134:6:2,2:1,0'
myscript.pl,
#!/usr/local/ActivePerl-5.20/bin/env perl
my $input = $ARGV[0];
$input =~ s/ /\,/g;
print $input, "\n";
__DATA__
output
0/1:-1,-1,-1:146:28:14,14:4,0,0/1:-1,-1,-1:134:6:2,2:1,0
This will remove all spaces, not just the space in question