Read and output a txt file to a desired format

I have a text file:

- the quick brown
- fox jumps over
- the lazy dog

The structure of each line is [hyphen] [space] [text].

Then I wrote this:

echo "🎉$(cat file.txt | tr "\r\n" ";" | tr -d "-")"

// 🎉 the quick brown- fox jumps over- the lazy dog

How can I format the text like below? I want to add a space before the hyphen but cannot figure out the proper method.

🎉 the quick brown - fox jumps over - the lazy dog

You can use paste to concatenate the lines with -s, using a space character as delimiter provided by -d, then use sed to replace the first hyphen:

paste -sd ' ' file.txt | sed 's/-/🎉/'

🎉 the quick brown - fox jumps over - the lazy dog

Using any awk:

$ awk 'NR==1{sub(/-/,"🎉")} {printf "%s%s", sep, $0; sep=" "} END{print ""}' file
🎉 the quick brown - fox jumps over - the lazy dog

To format the text as you've described, with a space before each hyphen, you can modify your existing command slightly. Here's how you can do it:

echo "🎉$(sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ - /g' file.txt | tr -d "-")"

This command will give you the desired output:

🎉 the quick brown - fox jumps over - the lazy dog