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Find and replace single character w/awk given conditions

 
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# 8  
Old 07-17-2015
Quote:
Originally Posted by bakunin
Being an awk-ignorant i might be mistaken, but isn't the following much easier as a reformatting filter:

Code:
awk '$0=sprintf( "<some-format>\n", $1, $2, $3, $4);' /path/to/infile

For instance, to get the above alignment:

Code:
awk '$0=sprintf( "%-11s%-27s%-26s%s\n", $1, $2, $3, $4);' /path/to/infile

I hope this helps.

bakunin
Yes, IF...
  1. all of the fields are always present (note that field 3 is empty in the 2nd line in the sample input),
  2. there are no spaces in the middle of any of the fields (the above code would discard everything after the 1st space in the middle of the last field on each line; except on the 2nd line where the 3rd field would be changed from an empty string to bay and the 4th field would be changed from bay tree. to tree.),
  3. you know the number of fields when you write the format string, and
  4. you know the number of characters to appear in each field when you write the format string.
The code I suggested in post #6 will:
  1. work with any standards conforming version of awk,
  2. will determine the number of fixed width input fields and the number of characters in each field from the input parameter FIELDWIDTHS,
  3. strip off leading and trailing spaces from each field (although stripping trailing spaces only matters on the last field).
Looking back at the code I suggested, it can be simplified somewhat keeping all of the features listed above, but I still think it provided a good starting point for a general solution to the given problem.
 
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