remove white space before delimiter with sed

Posted by Erik on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Erik
Published on 2012-10-22T04:45:18Z Indexed on 2012/10/22 5:05 UTC
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I have data of the following format that I want to input into LibreOffice calc

data | num | num | num | num

For some reason Libreoffice does not think the string "3214 " is a number by default (trailing white space).

I want to replace '(\s)*|' with '|' where \s stands for space and * for the Kleene star operation. And do this at multiple places in each line (all matches).

I tried:

sed -i 's/(\s)*|/|/' DataStats0914.txt

But it has no effect.

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