Shell Programming and Scripting

Sorry the error was for akshays code.

Corona688, I tried yours on the sample data and all worked fine. I then tried it on the real file, there are 70 columns/fields in the file. The file has 4688 real lines, when you do a wc -l it has 4876 lines because of the lines not being always 70 (cr, end of line etc before reaching 70 values). So when I ran your program it has only 3751 lines.

I will upload the real file.

Thanks,
Tim

Show the data you have and the data you want, then, or nobody will be able to make this data work for you.

added csv file (but its really pipe delimited)

OK, that's what the input you have looks like, now, what does the output you want look like?

I can see my code is wrapping lines where you might not like, but if it didn't, it wouldn't be 70 columns. Your data seems more complicated than your explanation.

The goal would be that I can load all lines in the file and that each column/field is delimited by a pipe and each row has exactly 70 col/fields. The data has embedded cr/lf/eol in it. It came from an xls.

Thanks,
Tim

---------- Post updated at 04:50 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:46 PM ----------

and from the original xls, there are 4688 rows.

Making progress. Spotted one big bug and tracking one subtler one.

Okay, I never imagined that tr would do this:

Code:

$ echo "||||||||" | tr -s '\r\n' '||'

|

$

| is not listed in the input set, why would it delete it? But several versions of tr do this, I guess this is "normal". It removes empty records, ruining column counts... and if I don't use -s, you get two consecutive newlines counting as multiple records, which ruins it the other way, adding extra records.

Trying to figure out a tr-alternative which isn't as stupid.