grep: match all characters up to (not including) first blank space

Question

I have a text file that has the following format:

characters(that I want to keep) (space) characters(that I want to remove)

So for example:

Answer 1

Following up on the answer by @Steve, if you want to use a different separator (eg. comma), you can specify it using -F. This will be useful if you want the content of each line upto the first comma, such as when trying to read the value of the first field in a csv file.

$ awk -F "," '{print $1}' text1.txt > text2.txt