UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have this:

((9:0.010,(11:0.089,13:0.004))

and I would like this:

((A9,(A11,A13))

How do I delete the semi colon and the number (i.e. 0.010) after the semi colon? Also, how can I add the letter before the number that is NOT removed?

Thank you in advance!

---------- Post updated at 06:28 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:23 PM ----------

Whoops, I meant to type COLON

Are there any characters in you input other than colon, comma, period, open and close parentheses, and digits?

Is this a line in a file or is it the value stored in a shell variable? If it is in a file, will there be more than one line?

What shell are you using?

What OS are you using?

Is the letter you want to add always a uppercase A?

Will the parentheses always be arranged the same way?

Will there always be 3 numbers you want to keep and 1 colon after each number you want to keep?

Are there any characters in you input other than colon, comma, period, open and close parentheses, and digits?

Nope, just digits, colons, commas, and parentheses

Is this a line in a file or is it the value stored in a shell variable? If it is in a file, will there be more than one line?

The lines are in a text file. Files have between 1 and 1000 lines

What OS are you using?

Mac OSX

Is the letter you want to add always a uppercase A?

No. I could add any letter, upper or lower case.

Will the parentheses always be arranged the same way?

Yes

Will there always be 3 numbers you want to keep and 1 colon after each number you want to keep?

I want to delete the four digits and decimal point after the colon and retain the digits before the colon. The number after the colon is always x.xxx and the number before the colon is either one digit or two but never three

I thought I could do something like this: awk \:\d\.\d+ file > file_b for the first task at least, but have not been successful. Thank you for your help!

Here is a sed approach:

Code:

$ sed 's#:[0-9.]*##g;s#[0-9]\+#A&#g' file
((A9,(A11,A13))

The following seems to do what you want:

Code:

awk -v letter='A' '
{       # Delete all occurrences of ":x.xxx" where each x is a digit.
        gsub(/:[0-9.]+/, "")
        # Insert "letter" before remaining digit strings.
        gsub(/[0-9]+/, letter "&")
        # Print the modified line.
        print
}' file

assuming your input is in a file named "file". If anyone wants to try this scrip using a Solaris/SunOS system, they should use /usr/xpg4/bin/awk, /usr/xpg6/bin/awk, or nawk instead of awk.

With the input you specified in the 1st message in this thread, the output produced is:

Code:

((A9,(A11,A13))

If you'd like to use some string other than "A" before the numbers added in the output, change the value assigned to letter in the first line of code.

---------- Post updated at 18:19 ---------- Previous update was at 18:00 ----------

With a version of sed that conforms to the standards (including the sed available on OS X), Yoda's sed command can be simplified to:

Code:

sed 's/\([0-9]*\):[0-9.]*/A\1/g' file

and still produce the same output.