Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,

I have a got a problem ..
I have t files as below:

1.txt contains

Code:

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column  1,  "cat",
column  24,  "dog",
column  100,  "rat",
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2.sh should contain

Code:

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awk 'BEGIN { printf ("%1s","cat")}' 
awk 'BEGIN { printf ("%24s","dog")}'
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When i execute 2.sh i should get the formatted printed output

I have tried the following codes;

awk '/column/ { print <> }' format.txt > we
where the <> is awk 'BEGIN .....
The problem with this command is I cannot get the lines above or below the search.
i.e only the lines containng "column" will be replaced and written to 2.sh

If i use sed, I cannot get the fileds from the file 1.txt
i.e; In order to get the "%1s" "%100s" from file 1.txt is not possible.

Is their any way we can overcome these two problems ?

thanks in advance
JS

If I understand the question you can do something like:

Code:

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

Regards

Hi Franklin52,

Thank you for the reply.
The code does't give me the output i need. But i think a bit a tuning can make it do.

Can u explain me how the code works here.

Thanks a lot
JS

The gsub function removes the comma's and the quotes.
The printf function uses the value of $2 for the width option to format the output.

Regards

Understanding the context of this problem would probably help. Your first awk script specifically looks only for lines containing "column"; if that's not what you want, why do you do that?

Getting a number which is always the second field on a line with sed is not at all impossible.

Code:

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

Franklin's code simply removes the commas and the double quotes (from between the fields, and around the third field, but for simplicity anywhere else too), then uses the selected fields in a printf directly.

Am specifically looking for lines that are beginning with "column" and replacing those lines with an " awk" command

In Short if i have a line :
column 1, "cat",
I need to replace this line with :
awk 'BEGIN { printf ("%1s","cat")}' ( given that no change should occur to the other lines in the file including the line numbers )

I need a parser to convert these lines.

Thanks to all
JS

What does this mean then? You want to print the whole file but replace those lines which are "column" lines?

Code:

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

Still a bigger context would be useful for understanding the problem and your attempt at a solution, at it seems highly inefficient to create umpteen simple awk scripts with only a BEGIN part.