Need help to extract a string delimited by any special character

kumariak · #1 (**permalink**) 05-31-2005

I have a string as follows
IS*blahblah
TED~blahblah
etc.
I want to list down only IS and TED

Can someone help me?

vino · #2 (**permalink**) 05-31-2005

How about this ?

Code:

#! /bin/sh

while read line
do
tmp=`echo $line | awk -F"[*~]" '{ printf $1 }'`
echo $tmp
done < input.txt

You can use tmp if you need to retain the value.

If you need to avoid tmp then this should work

Code:

#! /bin/sh

while read line
do
echo $line | awk -F"[*~]" '{ printf $1 "\n" }'
done < input.txt

From the prompt this would work,

Code:

awk -F"[*~]" '{ printf $1 "\n" }' < input.txt

You can introduce all your required delimiters within the "[ ]" of -F

Vino

zazzybob · #3 (**permalink**) 05-31-2005

Quote:

Originally Posted by vino

From the prompt this would work,

Code:

awk -F"[*~]" '{ printf $1 "\n" }' < input.txt

Can be simplified further....

awk -F"[*~]" '{print $1}' input.txt

Cheers
ZB

kumariak · #4 (**permalink**) 06-01-2005

Hi folks,

None of the solutions did not work. Can someone please help me.

My requirement was
The file has many lines. In each line, after 3 or 4 characters, there is a special character like *, ~ or + etc. The first 3 or 4 characters can be Alphabet, or Numeric. I wanted to extract the first 3 or 4 characters from each line with out the special character.

Thanks,
AK.

vino · #5 (**permalink**) 06-01-2005

And..

Code:

awk -F"[*~]" '{print $1}' input.txt

didnt work ??

If it didnt work, post the results of the above awk script for a sample section of your input file. Best would be the part of the input file, where the script fails.

Vino

kumariak · #6 (**permalink**) 06-01-2005

Thanks Vino for your help

My input file is as below

ISA~00~ ~00~ ~ZZ~12345 ~ZZ~54321 GS~SH~12345 ~54321
ST~86~000000007
BSN~00~0958
DTM~011~ET

And, when I ran the code above, the below results appeared

ISA~00~ ~00~ ~ZZ~12345 ~ZZ~54321 GS~SH~12345 ~54321
ST~86~000000007
BSN~00~0958
DTM~011~ET

My requirement is to get the first 2 or 3 characters like ISA, GS, ST, BSN and DTM. In this file, the special character is '~', but in other files it may vary.

kumariak · #7 (**permalink**) 06-01-2005

Thanks Vino for your help

My input file is as below

ISA~00~ ~00~ ~ZZ~12345 ~ZZ~54321 GS~SH~12345 ~54321
ST~86~000000007
BSN~00~0958
DTM~011~ET

And, when I ran the code above, the below results appeared

ISA~00~ ~00~ ~ZZ~12345 ~ZZ~54321 GS~SH~12345 ~54321
ST~86~000000007
BSN~00~0958
DTM~011~ET

My requirement is to get the first 2 or 3 characters like ISA, GS, ST, BSN and DTM. In this file, the special character is '~', but in other files it may vary.

Thanks,
AK

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