Solaris

Hi,

Can you please help me explain what the second statement in sed does

's/\("[^"|][^"|]*\)|\([^|][^|]*|\)/\1 \2

I didnt get why "[^"|] and ^| is specified twice after special/escape character (\("[^"|][^"|]*\)|).

what does \1 \2 means..??

Please clarify

Dude

\1 and \2 refer back to the parenthesized expressions in the match. These are thus called "backreferences". The numbering goes from left to right, so in \(a\(b\)c\(d\)\), the backreference \1 refers to the whole string, \2 refers to b, and \3 refers to d.

With that, the rest should be fairly simple to deduce. The regular expression finds two fields where the first begins with a double quote, and merges them back to one field by replacing the field separator with a space.

This doesn't work if you have fields with multiple spaces in them, but it's not terribly hard to fix.

Correct era, this will only work for 0 or one spaces in the field, and correcting it would be a loop of the second expression:

Code:

sed -e 's/ /|/g' -e :a -e 's/\("[^"|][^"|]*\)|\([^|][^|]*|\)/\1 \2/g;ta'

Hi All,

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

I was just wondering how we can handle multiple spaces in such case. Please find the below example

1234 "6734" "DSS" "8887578384" "ABC PRIVATE LMT REGNO 6" 3245

here the problem is, there are multiple spaces in the string. I tried adding the | for the command you have provided but it didnt work.

sed -e 's/ /|/g' -e 's/\("[^"|][^"|]*\)|\([^|][^|][^|]*|\)/\1 \2 \3/g' samp

Can you please suggest me the exact command to handle multiple spaces with in the string and in between the fields?

Thanks
Dude

Hi,

Earlier I have mentioned the command wrongly.

Input:
$ cat samp
1234 "6734" "DSS" "8887578384" "ABC PRIVATE LMT REGNO 6" 3245

Output of the unix command:

$ sed -e 's/ / /g' -e 's/ /|/g' -e 's/\("[^"|][^"|]*\)|\([^|][^|]*|\)\([^"|][^"|]*|\)/\1 \2 \3/g' samp

1234|"6734"|"DSS"|"8887578384"|"ABC PRIVATE| LMT|REGNO|6"|3245


Desired output:

1234|"6734"|"DSS"|"8887578384"|"ABC PRIVATE LMT REGNO 6"|3245

Also just would like to know if we can handle it dynamically? To be more clear now there are 4 spaces ("ABC PRIVATE LMT REGNO 6") with in the string. In case if we have more spaces how can this be handled?

Please clarify..

Thanks
Dude

Answer already provided in post #10