Help with Reading Text from file

yajaykumar · #1 (**permalink**) 09-02-2008

Hello,

I am having a tough time reading data from an input text file.
The input file has lines of data which is comma seperated. Each line represents a record/row, but unfortunately the data in the individual column/fields have spaces and `cat filename`is not returning entire line ( to read individual records).

How can I read individual records from this file? Is there a way to do it?
Below is a sample of the input file and it is also attached with this post.

Content Type,Author,Initial Submit Date,Task Name,Task Start Date,Task End Date,Task Owner,Completion Date
Workflow Properties,wcm_master,,,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties
Workflow Properties,wcm_master,,,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties
Workflow Properties,wcm_master,1217361943,TaskAddFile,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties
Workflow Properties,wcm_master,1217362058,TaskAddFile,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties,Workflow Properties
Email Test Flow,wcm_master,1217971876,TaskAddFile,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow
CGI Test,n1plomen,1219776115,TaskAddFile,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test
CGI Test,n1plomen,1219776268,TaskAddFile,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test
CGI Test,n1plomen,1219776333,TaskAddFile,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test
CGI Test,n1plomen,1219776417,TaskAddFile,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test
CGI Test,n1plomen,1219776470,TaskAddFile,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test
CGI Test,n1plomen,1219787503,TaskAddFile,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test
CGI Test,n1plomen,1219787605,TaskAddFile,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test,CGI Test
Email Test Flow,wcm_author,1219865848,TaskAddFile,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow
Email Test Flow,wcm_author,1219865871,TaskAddFile,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow
Email Test Flow,wcm_author,1219865908,TaskAddFile,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow,Email Test Flow

Your help is highly appreciated!

Thank you,
Ajay

otheus · #2 (**permalink**) 09-02-2008

The "backtick" operators strip out the newlines and replace them with spaces, so yeah, that's a problem for you. You need to do something like this instead:

Code:

cat your-file | while read line; do 
  something... something to $line;
done

yajaykumar · #3 (**permalink**) 09-02-2008

otheus,

Thanks a lot! It worked.

radoulov · #4 (**permalink**) 09-02-2008

Or without cat:
(remove the -r flag if your shell does not support it)

Code:

while IFS= read -r;do
  printf "--> %s\n" "$REPLY"
done<testwf.txt

For large files consider using another parsing tool, not shell loops.

joeyg · #5 (**permalink**) 09-02-2008

Can you use something like the following?

Code:

while read zf
   do
   cont_type=$(echo "$zf" | cut -d"," -f1)
   echo "Content Type ="$cont_type
   author=$(echo "$zf" | cut -d"," -f2)
   echo "Author ="$author
done <input_file

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