Replacing leading "0" with blanks 3

[TSch]

Hi folks,

I need to automatically format several strings in a way that every leading "0" is being replaced by a " " (blank)...

Any idea how I could do this ?

The strings could look like this:

000000000028302
000000028372022
000018000290000

And they're supposed to look like this after being formatted:

          28302
       28372022
    18000290000

It is important to have the blanks because each string is supposed to be a 15 character field that's being read by another programm ...

Regards
Thomas

 

[PHV]

sed -e 's!^0! !;: loop' -e 's! 0!  !;t loop' /path/to/input >output

Hope This Helps, PH.
FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[TSch]

You're a genius !!!!

Thanks a lot !

I have no idea what this does, but it works ... ;-)

 

[PHV]

I have no idea what this does
man sed

 

[p5wizard]

Without reading the man page, I'd hazard this guess:

first replace one leading zero with a space

then in the input line, loop to replace all occurrences of ' 0' with ' '

To understand looping/branching in sed programs fully (and write one myself) I *would* need reading the man page though.

Side remark: what if the leading zeroes aren't in the first field of the file?


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[columb]

Could one get clever with an awk statement that used printf to format the output? Something like

awk '{printf "%15d\n", $1}' input_file

This could be modified to cover p5wizard's question about formatting fields other than the first.


On the internet no one knows you're a dog

Columb Healy

 

[p5wizard]

rephrase:

Side remark: what if the leading zeroes aren't in the first field of the file [red]and fields are not separated by spaces (tabs, commas, semicolons)[/red]?

for commas:

[tt]sed -e 's!^0! !; s!,0!, !g;: loop' -e 's! 0! !;t loop' /path/to/input >output[/tt]


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[andy61]

Another option ...

$ cat /tmp/xxx
0001234
0001235
0001234
0001234
0987651
0000043

$ for v in $(</tmp/xxx)
do
typeset -LZ7 v;typeset -R7 v
echo "$v"
done
1234
1235
1234
1234
987651
43

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

For a little variety:

perl -lne 's/^(0+)/" " x length($1)/e;print' < /tmp/xxx



Trojan.