kevinlent
asked on
Awk
I have a long string of text, for example:
A12345678917/02/00Mr Smith
I need to create an output file with each value on a separate line. The values are either text, numeric or dates etc and are fixed widths.
I have tried using awk and substr to select the first 10 characters and output on a line, followed by linefeed, then the next 8, then line feed, then next 15 and line feed etc.
Can anyone provide me with an awk script to do this - or an alternative program I can use?
By the way im using GNUs awk on win95 platform.
thanks and regards, kevin
A12345678917/02/00Mr Smith
I need to create an output file with each value on a separate line. The values are either text, numeric or dates etc and are fixed widths.
I have tried using awk and substr to select the first 10 characters and output on a line, followed by linefeed, then the next 8, then line feed, then next 15 and line feed etc.
Can anyone provide me with an awk script to do this - or an alternative program I can use?
By the way im using GNUs awk on win95 platform.
thanks and regards, kevin
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ASKER
Tel2,
Unfortunately cut does a column at a time, not a record at a time.
So cut doesnt do what I had hoped, any more ideas :(
Unfortunately cut does a column at a time, not a record at a time.
So cut doesnt do what I had hoped, any more ideas :(
Sorry Kelvin,
I didn't know your string could be longer than 1 line. If you have the standard "sed" utility, then you could do this:
Here's a sample infile:
A12345678917/02/00Mr Smith
B98765432128/02/01Mrs Smith
And this command:
cat infile | sed "s/^\(..........\)\(......
It gives this output:
A123456789
17/02/00
Mr Smith
B987654321
28/02/01
Mrs Smith
Is that what you want?
Note that this temporarily inserts "~"s in places you will want the line-feeds to be, and then tr converts them to line-feeds. There might be a way to do this in one step, but I don't know it.
So, the above will not work properly if "~" ever appears in the infile. In this case, try to change the command to use a character (in place of "~") which WILL never appear in infile.
I didn't know your string could be longer than 1 line. If you have the standard "sed" utility, then you could do this:
Here's a sample infile:
A12345678917/02/00Mr Smith
B98765432128/02/01Mrs Smith
And this command:
cat infile | sed "s/^\(..........\)\(......
It gives this output:
A123456789
17/02/00
Mr Smith
B987654321
28/02/01
Mrs Smith
Is that what you want?
Note that this temporarily inserts "~"s in places you will want the line-feeds to be, and then tr converts them to line-feeds. There might be a way to do this in one step, but I don't know it.
So, the above will not work properly if "~" ever appears in the infile. In this case, try to change the command to use a character (in place of "~") which WILL never appear in infile.
ASKER
Thanks very much
You asked what other unix utils I was using: I have a copy of unixdos (downloaded from shareware.com) which includes about 60 of the best unix utils ported for 32bit windows. I also have GNUs grep/egrep/fgrep, sed, diff and awk utils.
thanks again, kevin