That's funny. In your original post you said "the first word", and demonstrated input with leading numeric digits that you removed from the output. But I wouldn't call changing "first word" to "first three words" a matter of being clear. I would call that changing the specification.

If by "word" you mean clumps of characters separated by white space, you could change the original regexp to: 

s/^(?:\S+\s+){3}//

[download]

In other words, take the first three occurrences of clumps of characters which could be anything that is not space, followed by one or more spaces. Repeat that three times. And then substitute those three occurrences with an empty string.

As before, test your output on the screen before committing to a file.


Dave

In reply to Re^3: extra spaces between the characters in string by davido
in thread extra spaces between the characters in string by harshashende

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