how to substitute minus sign with tr

Question

I'm trying to replace several symbols with spaces, and I thought tr was the right command. So I tried

cat myfile | tr '_[]()-/' ' '

But I get the error

range-endpoints of ']-/' are in reverse collating sequence order

presumably because I can't have a minus sign in the input characters. Can I accomplish this using tr?

what version of tr are you using? what OS? GNU tr copes with this without a problem. Other versions of tr may require some of the characters to be escaped. — cas, Dec 02 '15 at 01:13

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 02 '15 at 01:40

4

The message apparently comes from GNU tr, and perhaps is due to some issue with locale settings. The info page for tr suggests putting the - last in the set, to avoid confusing it as part of a range, e.g.,

cat myfile | tr '_[]()/-' ' '

answered Dec 02 '15 at 01:40

Thomas Dickey

76,765

Work fine with tr (GNU coreutils) 8.23 – cuonglm Dec 02 '15 at 01:59
Google found several comments all related to GNU coreutils, but I found no relevant bug reports - a better answer would replicate OP's problem. I tested with 8.23 and 8.13 (no warnings). – Thomas Dickey Dec 02 '15 at 02:01
Thank you - simply putting the minus last in the set solved the problem! – Sanjay Manohar Dec 02 '15 at 16:51

cuonglm · Answer 2 · 2015-12-02T02:02:45.013

1

With any POSIX tr:

tr '_][()/-' '[ *]' <file

will work.

Note that the use of [ *] is required by POSIX. In:

tr string1 string2

When string2 shorter than string1, a BSD tr will pad string2 with the last character of string2, so tr '_][()/-' ' ' is not guaranteed to work.

edited Dec 02 '15 at 02:02

answered Dec 02 '15 at 01:58

cuonglm

153,898

I considered that also, but setting POSIXLY_CORRECT failed to reproduce the problem. – Thomas Dickey Dec 02 '15 at 02:02
Thank you - simply putting the minus last in the set solved the problem – Sanjay Manohar Dec 02 '15 at 16:51

how to substitute minus sign with tr

2 Answers2