BWAHAHAHAHOUHAHA-HAHA!
I honestly did not expect ChatGPT to fail so badly! (I will not paste any of its output, Lunduke!)
It's my first time to directly use ChatGPT. I just couldn't come up with anything I want to know that it could reliably tell me. Until today when I realised I keep receiving requests by some relatives to do a bash oneliner for some text files and I'd be offloaded if I could just tell them how to do it themselves in PowerShell but it'll be long before I've learnt what I need so I have the option to ask an RTFM-level-stupid question on StackOverflow or... to test out the great deceiver. So I sacrificed the confidentiality of my name, surname and friggin' phone number to have a go. I'll paste here just my input but you'll be well able to deduce how it went:
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I want to remove duplicate whitespace from a text file on a Windows 10/11 PC. On Linux with bash what I would do is:
$ cat spacious.txt | tr -s [:space:] > compact.txt
What is the easiest way to do the same on Windows without WSL?
What is the simplest PowerShell script which can produce the same result?
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By whitespace I meant not only " ", but also carriage returns. Does '\s' match carriage returns as well as " "? Also, when I have duplicate carriage returns in the spacious.txt, I want to have single carriage returns in the compact.txt and not ' ' as you suggested. Please provide a suggestion taking this into account.
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Sounds better, but now duplicate spaces and tabs, and carriage returns will be replaced with 1 carriage return AND a newline character. What I want is for duplicate [:space:] as defined by POSIX to be replaced with a single instance of the same kind of whitespace - spacebar, tab, return, enter or whatever other kind of whitespace there is. Two tabs should become one tab, two spacebars - one spacebar, two carriage returns - one carriage return and so on. I pointed you to the bash oneliner:
$ cat spacious.txt | tr -s [:space:] > compact.txt
and I know I should not expect you to understand what it does as you are uncapable of understanding anything due to being no more than a glorified pattern-matching algorithm, but please try to reproduce the exact same functionality in the PowerShell script you recommend. Just to be clear, in case you got confused, I didn't just ask you two things - I asked you the same thing in two different ways - first one case-by-case example to guide you and then one bash oneliner that fulfills exactly what I want, no more, no less.
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Was the third and final suggestion I got by ChatGPT correct? It was the exact same as the first suggestion. Though of course the chatbot acted as if it had corrected itself.
And of course if my question had been answered on StackOverflow, ChatGPT's answer would have been correct. But I wouldn't have had to ask it the question as I've done my own research beforehand. Also the chatbot would get merit that does not belong to it.
If the problem is the way I asked, then I have to ask myself: Is programming more tedious, or prompt engineering?