Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have a problem where some of the records I need to process have the first address field as something like "10Walpole Street" where obviously I want it to be "10 Walpole Street". I know I need to somehow separate out the integer and probably form a new string variable, but I just don't know how to do it.

There are other instances where there may be a ";" stuck in there instead of a space too, futher into the address or in the next address field, etc. Thinking about this latter case, I should be able to add ";" to the field separator list.

I'm still left with some other badly formed addresses that sometimes contain no space in the middle where there probably should be a field separator or space, for example "scotlanwellgreen,stirling", I don't know if I could hope to catch all such occurances, and I don't even know for sure that such place names are supposed to have spaces! Looking up "scotlanwell green" on google suggests that I might try "Scotlandwell green", which turns out to be a real place - it's just another badly typed or formed address that I probably have no hope of catching and correcting in a script. The occurances are seemingly random.

Any help with these would be much appreciated!

Replace $0 with the correct field:

Code:

awk '/[0-9][A-Z]/ {
    n = index($0, /A-Z/)
    num = substr($0, 1, n)
    addr = substr($0, n + 1 )
    print num, addr
 }'

Code:

> echo "$street"
10Walpole Street
> snum=$(echo $street | cut -d" " -f1 | tr -d "[:alpha:]" )
> sadd=$(echo $street | cut -d" " -f1- | tr -d "[0-9]")
> echo ${snum}" "${sadd}
10 Walpole Street
>

If you have the address in a shell variable, you don't need 4 external commands to process it; you don't need any:

Code:

string="10Walpole Street"
street=${string##*[!A-Za-z ]}
num=${string%"$street"}
printf "%s %s\n" "$num" "$street"

what if string="10W2 Street" ?
The upon script won't work well.
string="10w3c street"
num=${string%%[A-Za-z ]*}
street=${string##"$num"}
printf "%s %s" "$num" "$street"

The output of that script is:

Code:

10 w3c street

Or, with the other string:

Code:

10 w2 street

Isn't that what is wanted?

If not, then the problem was not adequately specified (and the only answer may be to open a text editor and fix the file manually).