Shell Programming and Scripting

I prefer no space between the two ;; I had just used that to highlight the empty field.

I think we've had a problem communicating because the example input doesn't match the sample results you said that you want to see. When you said the input was truncated, I think most of us thought you were giving us complete lines (but just giving us a few lines; not that you were also shortening fields in the few lines you gave us). And then showing a <space> between semicolons in sample output when you didn't want the space there caused more confusion.

I think you'll get what you want if you take the code supplied by binlib modified to use the field start and end points specified in your first message, and modified to use ";" instead of "," as the output field separator:

Code:

awk '
BEGIN {
  n = split("1-9,11-48,60-68,112-142,143-159", a, "[^0-9]") - 1
  for (i = 1; i <= n; i += 2)
    l[i] = a[i+1] - (p[i] = a[i]) + 1
}
{
  for (i = 1; i <= n; i += 2) {
    x = substr($0, p[i], l[i])
    sub(/ +$/, "", x)
    printf("%s%s", x, (i < n)? ";" : "\n")
  }
}'

If you're having trouble following the initial set up in the BEGIN clause or the for loop in the main body of the script, another way to do it would be:

Code:

awk '{
	out=sprintf("%s;%s;%s;%s;%s", substr($0,1,8), substr($0,11,36),
		substr($0,60,7), substr($0,112,29), substr($0,143))
	gsub(" ","",out)
	print out
}'

My apologies for posting different sample output. I agree, that was confusing.

And that works!!! Thanks!