Shell Programming and Scripting

Is there any way to remove carriage retuns between the records?

We have input records separated by TABS and have carriage returns as below:

123 456 789 ABC "1952.00" 678 "abcdef
ghik
lmno"

Above we have 7 fields, notice that the 7th field in the records has carriage returns and make it into records...

I need to remove the carriage returns and make it look like below:

123 456 789 ABC "1952.00" 678 "abcdef ghik lmno"

Let me know your thoughts?

Thanks,
AC

Use Awk:

Code:

{ record = record $0
  # If number of quotes is odd, continue reading record.
  if ( gsub( /"/, "&", record ) % 2 )
  { record = record " "
    next
  }
}
{ print record
  record = ""
}

Code:

 > cat file
123 456 789 ABC "1952.00" 678 "abcdef
ghik
lmno"
 > cat file | tr  \\n " " ; echo
123 456 789 ABC "1952.00" 678 "abcdef ghik lmno"

A less fancy way is:

Code:

for i in `cat file`
   do echo -n "$i "
done
echo

In Solaris replace echo with /usr/ucb/echo

Why use cat when cat is a do-nothing program here? Why not

Code:

tr  \\n " " <file

What if the file contains more than one record?

Record1 "1952.00" 678 "abcdef
ghik
lmno"
Record2 "1952.00" 678 "abcdef
ghik
lmno"

Wouldn't the output be

Record1 "1952.00" 678 "abcdef ghik lmno" Record2 "1952.00" 678 "abcdef ghik mno"

Good points.

Thanks a lot for all your inputs. The below code soles the problem with the example I had given. When the data had double quotes...

{ record = record $0
# If number of quotes is odd, continue reading record.
if ( gsub( /"/, "&", record ) % 2 )
{ record = record " "
next
}
}
{ print record
record = ""
}

The tr \\n " " removes all the new lines and forms a one big record. I don't want this to happen.

Thanks again everybody.

AC

One more thing.. Could you tell me what it does excatly....
especially if ( gsub( /"/, "&", record ) % 2 )

Thanks in advance.

AC