Sed to remove everything after "." in file using * command?

Question

I have the following data.txt:

 95 flour.
 47 water.s
 etc..

I need to remove everything after the period (.) in the file to yield something like this:

 95 flour
 47 water
 etc..

I have tried the using these sed commands without success, which yield a blank document:

sed "s/'.*//" data.txt > cleaned.txt 
sed 's/\.*//' data.txt > cleaned.txt 

Answer 1

Either escape the . with a backslash to get a literal ., or use brackets to define a character class:

sed 's/\..*$//' data.txt > cleaned.txt
sed 's/[.].*$//' data.txt > cleaned.txt

You tried 's/\.*//', which is "zero or more literal dots", which is different from "literal dot followed by zero or more of anything", i.e. 's/\..*//'. I also added a $ for good measure.

Answer 2

This is the simplest:

sed "s/\..*//"

And this is, I think, one of the best ways of doing it (better than pure bash or Python).