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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Delimted to padded conversion with unknown field length Post 302441438 by Michael Stora on Friday 30th of July 2010 05:41:20 PM
Old 07-30-2010
Delimted to padded conversion with unknown field length

I’m looking for an elegant way to convert a delimited file (comma delimited in this case) to padded columns (for printing in non-proportional font) but the length of each column is not known ahead of time. It needs to be calculated for each column from the longest entry in that column in a given file.

I can live with a known number of columns, but I’d rather have something that does not rely on that.

I’d rather not brute force this (with a pre-read and column length arrays) if I’m missing some elegant use of an existing command.

My shell is BASH. This is for a Cygwin in a Windows environment (no choice).

Mike
 

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COLUMN(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						 COLUMN(1)

NAME
column -- columnate lists SYNOPSIS
column [-tx] [-c columns] [-s sep] [file ...] DESCRIPTION
The column utility formats its input into multiple columns. Rows are filled before columns. Input is taken from file operands, or, by default, from the standard input. Empty lines are ignored. The options are as follows: -c Output is formatted for a display columns wide. -s Specify a set of characters to be used to delimit columns for the -t option. -t Determine the number of columns the input contains and create a table. Columns are delimited with whitespace, by default, or with the characters supplied using the -s option. Useful for pretty-printing displays. -x Fill columns before filling rows. Column exits 0 on success, >0 if an error occurred. ENVIRONMENT
COLUMNS The environment variable COLUMNS is used to determine the size of the screen if no other information is available. EXAMPLES
(printf "PERM LINKS OWNER GROUP SIZE MONTH DAY HH:MM/YEAR NAME " ; ls -l | sed 1d) | column -t SEE ALSO
colrm(1), ls(1), paste(1), sort(1) HISTORY
The column command appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno. BSD
June 6, 1993 BSD
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