sed join lines together

Question

what would be the sed (or other tool) command to join lines together in a file that do not end w/ the character \'0\'?

I\'ll have lines like this

Answer 1

A typically cryptic Perl one-liner:

perl -pe 'BEGIN{$/="0\n"}s/\n//g;$_.=$/'

This uses the sequence "0\n" as the record separator (by your question, I'm assuming that every line should end with a zero). Any record then should not have internal newlines, so those are removed, then print the line, appending the 0 and newline that were removed.

Another take to your question would be to ensure each line has 17 pipe-separated fields. This does not assume that the 17th field value must be zero.

awk -F \| '
    NF == 17 {print; next}
    prev {print prev $0; prev = ""}
    {prev = $0}
'