Hi All,

I got this requirement to process a complex CSV file.

Eg File.

Line 1: Name:,XYz
Line 2: Age:,15
Line 3: Grade:,7
Line 4: 
Line 5: English, Maths, Science,Spanish
Line 6:10,11,13,14

Line 1: Name:,XYz,,
Line 2: Age:,15,,
Line 3: Grade:,7,,
Line 4: ,,,,
Line 5: English, Maths, Science,Spanish
Line 6:10,11,13,14

$ awk -F, -v OFS=, '{for(i=NF;i<=4;i++){$i=$i""}print}' a.txt
Line 1: Name:,XYz,,
Line 2: Age:,15,,
Line 3: Grade:,7,,
Line 4: ,,,
Line 5: English, Maths, Science,Spanish
Line 6:10,11,13,14

Or:

awk -F, 'NF=4' OFS=, file

Thanks a ton for your reply.... itkamaraj and Franklin52.

I observe that the max column (comma) is assumed to be 4... but that is not in my case ..

The number of column is not fixed ... The file can have 3 or even 30 columns .... so the commas has to be placed for the length of values present in Line 5.


Thank you

$ column_size=$(awk -F, 'a<NF{a=NF}END{print a}' a.txt)
$ echo $column_size
7
$ awk -F, -v OFS=, -v c="$column_size" 'NF=c' a.txt 
Line 1: Name:,XYz,,,,,
Line 2: Age:,15,,,,,
Line 3: Grade:,7,,,,,
Line 4: ,,,,,,
Line 5: English, Maths, Science,Spanish,,,
Line 6:10,11,13,14,,,
a,b,c,d,e,f,g

Hi All,

I want the extra commas to be placed in a file and save it with the commas. The above help helped me to display the content with commas.

Please help me in adding the commas and saving the file. The number of commas is also not fixed ... the length of the max column has to be taken.

Thanks in advance.

$ column_size=$(awk -F, 'a<NF{a=NF}END{print a}' a.txt)
$ awk -F, -v OFS=, -v c="$column_size" 'NF=c' a.txt > output.txt