Looking for an 'Elegant' Solution 1

[tbohon]

I have a file which looks like this:

----------------------------------------------------------
|   Last Name     |  First Name | MI  | AcctNr  |  Status|
----------------------------------------------------------
| Duck            | Daffy       | D   | 012345  | 2      |
----------------------------------------------------------
| Flintstone      | Frederick   | F   | 223344  | 1      |
----------------------------------------------------------
(etc.)

which I need to turn into this:

Duck|Daffy|D|012345|2
Flintstone|Frederick|F|223344|1
(etc.)

I've written a short Perl script to do the change but I got to thinking that this could probably be done much faster and easier with sed and/or awk. Problem is, I'm just learning these tools and am getting nowhere.

Would appreciate ideas on doing this without using Perl so that I can learn as I go.

Thanks!

Tom

"My mind is like a steel whatchamacallit ...

 

[cspilman]

Something like this?

awk '!/^$|\-/{gsub(/ +|^\| |\|$/,"");print}' filename

Regards,
Chuck

 

[johnherman]

you could use the unix tr command to remove all blanks

-------------------------
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was - Steven Wright

 

[tbohon]

Chuck:

Works great other than it doesn't get rid of that first line (the header with "Last Name", etc. in it).

Thanks!

Tom

"My mind is like a steel whatchamacallit ...

 

[cspilman]

This should take care of the header:

awk '!/Last|^$|\-/{gsub(/ +|^\| |\|$/,"");print}' filename

Regards,
Chuck

 

[tbohon]

Chuck:

But I can do that with grep -v so this is 'the' solution!

Thanks again.

Best,

Tom

"My mind is like a steel whatchamacallit ...

 

[PHV]

Another way:
awk -F' *[|] *' 'NF>1 && NR>3{print $2"|"$3"|"$4"|"$5"|"$6}' filename

Hope This Helps, PH.
Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884 or FAQ181-2886

 

[TonyGroves]

Is that database query output?

If you're using MySQL, you can get the output in tab-separated format with no headings if you use the -B and --skip-column-names options in your "mysql" command. Then, if you want, you can easily convert the tabs to another character using tr.