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How to cut by delimiter, and delimiter can be anything except numbers?

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# 8  
Old 03-06-2012
Now it's so obvious that I feel stupid Smilie
Thank you Alister Smilie
# 9  
Old 03-06-2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by tukuyomi
Now it's so obvious that I feel stupid Smilie
Thank you Alister Smilie
It happens to everyone from time to time. Sometimes, when debugging, we see what we expect instead of what's actually there.

Regards,
Alister
# 10  
Old 03-06-2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by alister
Code:
tr -cs '[:digit:]' '[\t*]'

@alister

I am rather sure you can help me to have a better understanding of this notation:
Is the wildcard mandatory ? What is it used for ?
(i mean isn't the use of the -s option of tr sufficient and intended for that gathering purpose?) or are there some other reasons to prefer that notation rather than a simple '\t' ?

Thanks in advance
# 11  
Old 03-06-2012
yas:
Code:
grep -Eo '[0-9]+' infile | paste - - -

Analogous to the nice tr statement:
Code:
sed 's/[^0-9][^0-9]*/\t/g' infile

# 12  
Old 03-06-2012
@Scruti,

I am just wondering about the wildcard in the '[\t*]' notation, why not to just use '\t' instead ? Is that wildcard just a litteral one (part of the [ ] list), or is it interpreted ?
Last edited by ctsgnb; 03-06-2012 at 04:39 PM..
# 13  
Old 03-06-2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by ctsgnb
@alister

I am rather sure you can help me to have a better understanding of this notation:
Is the wildcard mandatory ? What is it used for ?
(i mean isn't the use of the -s option of tr sufficient and intended for that gathering purpose?) or are there some other reasons to prefer that notation rather than a simple '\t' ?

Thanks in advance
That notation as I used it is not so much a wildcard as a repetition operation. It says to pad the second set with the preceding characer, \t, until the second set's length equals the first's (a number can follow the asterisk to indicate an exact count, [\t*3] would include three tabs in the set).

Why bother with that? Historically, BSD and SysV tr implementations behaved differently when the second set is shorter than the first. This notation guarantees that this does not occur.

In practice, at least with open source systems, you'll probably never run into this issue.

For more info, see the POSIX man page for tr. Specifically, the EXTENDED DESCRIPTION section for the details of the syntax and APPLICATION USAGE for the history.

Regards,
Alister
This User Gave Thanks to alister For This Post:
ctsgnb
# 14  
Old 03-06-2012
The notation with the square brackets and the asterisk makes sure that the number of characters in the second string is equal to the length of the first string. This is the most portable way. If you use a single character for the second string, then it is not guaranteed to work across all implementations...
This User Gave Thanks to Scrutinizer For This Post:
ctsgnb
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