Hi there,
i'm quite new to unix scripint hence this thread.. i am trying to write a script that will read a comma delimited flat file one row at a time and write the data into a unix array at the end of the processing, i want to loop through the array and perform the necessary processing..

for example if my file in is the format ;

AAASDGH00000000,1HHHHJ0000000,QWWkjl0000000
SSSDDDD00000000,2395570000000,JKLIUG00000000


i want to a): cut and store the values that have been padded with zeros in an array without the zeros of course..

at the end of this processing i want to loop through the array of records and perform the necessary processing.. ican someone out there point in the right direction ? i'm currently reaching and that ain't doin any good..

any help will be greatly appreciated..

Regards
Wolkott

Take a gander at Perl. Perl was built with this type of processing in mind. You could also use awk for this but I would go with perl.

Some of the concepts that you would need to look up would be arrays, loops and regular expressions.

There are a variety of perl tutorials on the web where you could get started in learning.

And for another approach, I would use ksh. (I know, no surprise )...

I wouldn't make one pass to put the data in an array, and then make a pass through the array processing it. I would just process it as it comes. ksh can crack the file into fields if you set IFS to comma in this case. To ksh, "+(0)" is a pattern that matches any number of zeros. And you can use "%%" to strip a pattern off of a string. So here is a start:

With the Bourne shell (/bin/sh on most systems, /bin/bsh on recent Irixen), you combine the use of IFS and expr to strip trailing zeros off of fields. This gets really slow, though, if your data set is large.
You weren't very specific about the kind of processing you need to do with the data after the zeros have been stripped --- you mention the need for an array, but don't say why.

Note that with both the Korn shell and the Bourne shell solution, the output of the while loop can be piped to other filters, e.g.,

Continuing the thought of additional piping from my previous post, the easiest way to just split and strip is awk. Oh, and awk (and perl) remove the restriction inherent in both shell solutions, namely, you need to have the same number of fields on each line (or do some programming around it, left as an exercise to the reader --- I've always wanted to write that! )
The perl solution is quite similar:
The ruby is also quite similar:
As auswipe pointed out, you can do a good deal more processing in perl or ruby as well. Or in awk, for that matter, though it's a little less liberal in your choice of other internal processing.