UNIX text filters, part 2.5 of 3: expand and unexpand

This post is part of a series

Last week some guys at my company gave a little lecture on rust. They gave us some practical exercises, with some partially-written source files to complete. Unfortunately, the source files used spaces instead of TABs!

Luckily I knew how to use unexpand to fix this. And in case you are shaking your head in horror because you prefer spaces, worry not: expand can save you when you face the opposite problem.

expand

The expand command converts tabs into spaces. By default every TAB character at the beginning of each line is replaced by 8 spaces, but you can choose a different width with the -t option. You can also choose to expand all TABs, not just the leading ones, using the -a option. For example:

$ echo '    hello   world?' | expand -t 3
   hello    world?

As you can see, the TAB in the middle of the line is preserved. Well I guess you can’t really see it. Also, I am pretty sure the markdown-to-html converter I use turns tabs into spaces anyway. This example is a trainwreck, let’s move on.

unexpand

Unsurprisingly, unexpand does just the opposite of expand: it converts groups of leading spaces into TABs. So the command I used to “fix” the source files for the rust exercises was:

$ unexpand -t 4 main.rs

or to be more precise, since I wanted to replace the original file:

$ unexpand -t 4 main.rs > main.rs.2 && mv main.rs.2 main.rs

or to be even more precise, since I wanted to do this for multiple files:

$ for f in *.rs; do unexpand $f > $f.2 && mv $f.2 $f; done

Quirks

For some reason, the OpenBSD version of unexpand does not allow using the -t option. So if I had brought my OpenBSD laptop at the rust lecture I would have been stuck with spaces :(