Saturday, October 8, 2022

[SOLVED] Convert specified column in a multi-line string into single comma-separated line

Issue

Let's say I have the following string:

something1:    +12.0   (some unnecessary trailing data (this must go))
something2:    +15.5   (some more unnecessary trailing data)
something4:    +9.0   (some other unnecessary data)
something1:    +13.5  (blah blah blah)

How do I turn that into simply

+12.0,+15.5,+9.0,+13.5

in bash?


Solution

You can use awk and sed:

awk -vORS=, '{ print $2 }' file.txt | sed 's/,$/\n/'

Or if you want to use a pipe:

echo "data" | awk -vORS=, '{ print $2 }' | sed 's/,$/\n/'

To break it down:

  • awk is great at handling data broken down into fields
  • -vORS=, sets the "output record separator" to ,, which is what you wanted
  • { print $2 } tells awk to print the second field for every record (line)
  • file.txt is your filename
  • sed just gets rid of the trailing , and turns it into a newline (if you want no newline, you can do s/,$//)


Answered By - Dan Fego
Answer Checked By - Terry (WPSolving Volunteer)
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