Shell Programming and Scripting

Code:

sed -e 's/^[^ ]* *\([1-9][0-9]*\), *\("[^"]*"\),.*/"%\1s", \2/'

The above code seems to work
But I have some doubts here .
Where is this code searching for "column" ( though it worked on the first column statement ) ?
I have many statements beginning with "column". The sed here works for the first found "column". How can i make it work for all the column?

Thanks in advance
JS

Exactly !!

1.txt >> parser >> 2.sh

This is "parser" is where am getting stuck with..

Scroll back, I managed to edit my previous reply while you were responding to it.

Hello era,

I tried using the below code as u have given :
cat 1.txt | sed -e 's/^[^ ]* *\([1-9][0-9]*\), *\("[^"]*"\),.*/awk '"'"'BEGIN {printf("%\1s", \2)}'"'"'>> 2.sh/' > temp.txt

This worked for the first occurance of "column"

Where as when i used the code given below, there was no change in 1.txt and 2.sh.

sed -e 's/^column *\([1-9][0-9]*\), *\("[^"]*"\),.*/awk '"'"'BEGIN { printf ("%\1s", \2) }'"'/"

I did some changes in the above code and then too it was not making a single difference between the two files.

I think I can go ahead with teh first code. But can u tell me
1. how it is searching the first occurance of " column" ??
2. How can i make code search for all teh firt occurance of the "column " and replace it??

Thanks for teh help ...
JS

It's not searching for the first occurrence. The updated code contains precisely the modification to only match lines which start with "column". Probably there is something in the regular expression which doesn't match your examples exactly. Worked on the samples I copy/pasted from above.

The format of 1.txt is some what like this :

fish in the water
print

column 1, "cat",
column 24, "dog",
column 100, "rat"

hill and jill
run another hat

print column 23, "elephant"

I commit to work

print
column 45, "friend"
column 34, " mother"

The junk stuff I added are other lines of the file 1.txt

And you specifically want to turn this into six tiny awk scripts so it won't run too fast?

Sarcasm aside, Franklin's solution looks much closer to what you really ought to be doing.

Code:

awk '$1 ~ "column"{gsub(",|\"","");printf("%*s\n", $2, $3)}' 1.txt

The sed script I wrote before assumes -- based on the examples you gave earlier -- that "column" would always be right at the start of a line. If it's not really, you want to add a " *" after the "^". Lesson: don't obfuscate your examples too much.