# If you'd like to omit non-matching lines from the result; add ';d' to the end of the expression.
sed -E 's/[^\s-]\K-\s{1,3}//gm;t' <<< "The number of spaces after the hyphen can be 1, 2 or 3 like hyphen- ated, hyphen- ated, hyphen- ated .
This is a text with a hyphen- ated word in the middle of the sentence. But it also has - dashes - like the ones in the second sentence. The latter should not be modified"
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for SED, please visit: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/The-_0022s_0022-Command.html