How to remove a number of spaces between columns and put a custom number of spaces inside?

I have this column:

     USA     France    212     13
  Canada      Spain     34     23
  Me ico      Italy      4    390
   india   Portugal   5900     32
Malaysia    Holland     15     43

I want to remove the spaces like this:

     USA  France 212 13
  Canada   Spain  34 23
  Me ico   Italy   4390
   indiaPortugal5900 32
Malaysia Holland  15 43

and add a custom number of spaces between them

(the same number of spaces between every column).开发者_开发技巧

Is there a way to do this?

(for my left and right-aligned tables)

Edit:

Does anyone know how to check the content of a column (\%.c)?

---

A solution using 'perl'. I suppose first column is 8 characters width.

Program:

use strict;
use warnings;

## Hash with contents of each line. Example:
## $file{ 1 } = "... line 1 ..."
## $file{ 2 } = "... line 2 ..."
## ...
my %file;

## Max. number of characters of each column.
## $col_length[0] will have the max. number of characters of all string of
## first column, and the same for the others.
my @col_length;

while ( <> ) {
        next if /^\s*$/;
        chomp;

        ## Save fixed columns in array.
        ## A8 -> 8 characters of first columns.
        ## A11 -> 11 characters of second column.
        ## ...
        my @line = unpack( "A8A11A7A7", $_ );

        ## Remove leading and trailing spaces of each field.
        @line = map { s/^\s*//; s/\s*$//; $_ } @line;

        ## Save max. number of characters of each column.
        for ( 0 .. $#line ) {
                my $l = length $line[$_];
                $col_length[$_] = $l > ($col_length[$_] || 0) ? $l : $col_length[$_]; 
        }

        ## Save each input line.
        push @{ $file{ $. } }, @line;
}

## Print to output.
for ( sort { $a <=> $b } keys %file ) {
        my $format = join "", (map { "%" . $_ . "s" } @col_length), "\n";
        printf $format, @{$file{ $_ }};
}

Input file (infile):

     USA     France    212     13
  Canada      Spain     34     23
  Me ico      Italy      4    390
   india   Portugal   5900     32
Malaysia    Holland     15     43

Execution:

$ perl script.pl infile

Output:

     USA  France 212 13
  Canada   Spain  34 23
  Me ico   Italy   4390
   indiaPortugal5900 32
Malaysia Holland  15 43

---

As far as i can tell from your description, you need to do two passes over the lines.

In the first pass, you need to determine the width of all fields and you can't tell until you have gone through the whole list. For example, you do not know that you will have to get rid of three spaces between USA and France until you have reached the line with Portugal.

The second pass should be no problem after this.