Shell Programming and Scripting

Excuse the terrible title.

I have a text file of 1..n lines, each one containing at least one string between parentheses. Within each string, there is one or more strings separated by commas. I need to extract each string, thus:

input file:

(THIS,THAT)
(THE,OTHER)
(THING)
(OR,MAYBE)
(THIS,THING)

Would result in:

THIS
THAT
THE
OTHER
THING
OR
MAYBE
THIS
THING

I'm pulling some stuff over from an IBM mainframe to Unix and I need to do some work on the resulting strings.

awk is it...I just suck at it.

Kindest regards,
Kris

You might want to add something to delete the first line of the resulting file as the tr does a great job but also translates the first bracket into a blank line before your data so you end up with an additional line.

Code:

tr -sc 'a-zA-Z' '\n' < FILE

THIS
THAT
THE
OTHER
THING
OR
MAYBE
THIS
THING

sed does the trick:

Code:

tr -sc 'a-zA-Z' '\n' < FILE|sed '1d'
THIS
THAT
THE
OTHER
THING
OR
MAYBE
THIS
THING

Maybe I am not thinking clearly..

How does tr work? I mean, I tested it, and it clearly works. Maybe I do not understand the arguments for it. The man pages make it seem as though all it will do is replace SET1 with SET2, so how does: tr -sc 'a-zA-Z' '\n' make it just replace () and comas? Seems like it is basically replacing the opposite, (grep -v comes to mind..).

-c, -C, --complement
first complement SET1

-s, --squeeze-repeats
replace each input sequence of a repeated character that is listed in SET1 with a single occurrence of that character

It replaces every character that is not part of 'a-zA-Z' with a newline.

If the result is being pulled into a variable, there's no need for sed:

Code:

list=$( tr -sc 'a-zA-Z' '\n' < FILE )
list=${list#?}

Code:

sed 's/[()]//g' a.txt | tr "," "\n"