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Help creating well-formatted columns

 
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# 1  
Old 04-14-2011
Help creating well-formatted columns
Hi all

I'm having a few issues with sorting some data into easily-readable columns.

Original data in file:
Code:
Number of visits  IP Address
      8 244.44.145.122
      8 234.45.165.125
      6 225.107.26.10

I firstly tried the column -t command which results in this:

Code:
Number  of               visits  IP  Address
8       244.44.145.122
8       234.45.165.125
6       225.107.26.10

I also understand the pr command can be used, but I'm not sure how it could be used to split this into nicely formatted columns so the headings line up with the columns?

Any tips would be appreicated. Smilie
# 2  
Old 04-14-2011
That's a job for printf which stands for "print format(ted)". Example with awk to pass the header in the 1st line/record, since there is no distinguished delimeter between the 2 headers "Number of visits" and "IP Address":

Code:
awk 'NR>1 {printf("%-18s%-20s\n", $1,$2); next}1' infile
Number of visits  IP Address
8                 244.44.145.122
8                 234.45.165.125
6                 225.107.26.10

printf is available in shells as well as in most other programming/scripting languages.
# 3  
Old 04-14-2011
Wow, thanks a lot!

If you wish to explain how some of this works, can you do so?

I understand the 18s is the spacing for the first column, so what is the 20s doing? If I reduce the number it makes no difference at all. Unless that's setup incase a 3rd column is going to be used.

And what does the NR>1 1 mean? I should really familiarise myself with Unix syntax...

Thanks Smilie
# 4  
Old 04-14-2011
NR>1 If the line number ie. "Number Rows" is greater than 1, ie. line 2,3,4,5,6, ...

%-18s- -> aligned left, 18 -> characters wide, s -> type string

next just cancel the processing of the awk commands and take the next line/row

}1If the NR>1 is not true, just print out the line, which is in this case the header, since it has a value of NR==1, ie. is the 1st row in the input file.
# 5  
Old 04-14-2011
Okay, thanks very much for the help. Smilie
 
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