Shell Programming and Scripting

hi, pls someone tell me how to extract delimiters from any file and pass it to a unix script.since, im a beginner in unix i find it little bit difficult.how to use awk to do this?

let me know...........

hmmm....

A "delimiter" is not to be found out by any means. It is, what you *define* as delimiter.

consider the following file:

Code:

field1 ,| field2 | field3 ,|
field1 ,| field2 | field3 ,|
field1 ,| field2 | field3 ,|

You could define "|" as a delimiter. Then you would have 3 fields, separated by "|", which read "field1 ,", "field2 ," and "field3 ,". You could also define "," as a field separator, which would leave you with 3 fields per line, "field1 ", "| field2 | field3 " and "|".

There is no "correct" solution to it, you could define every other character as a delimiter too.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

suppose, i have a file in which im unaware of the delimiter of it.so ,is it possible to extract a text between the delimiter ,without knowing what delimiter it is..give an example for clear understanding.

If I tell you that I have kept money for you in my house and if you don't know where my house is. Do you think you can get the money?

The same thing goes for the delimeter...

Just do a cat on the file and look to see what character separates the fields. It will most likely be a comma, space, pipe, tab, or slash.

Code:

$ cat myfile
field1|field2|field3
$ cat myfile2
field1,field2,field3

In myfile | is the delimeter. In myfile2 , is the delimeter.

Sorry, but this is nonsense, as i have shown above. A "delimiter" is whatever you define to be a delimiter and it is completely arbitrary.

bakunin