replacing tab with comma and enclosing double quotes

[unixwhoopie]

Hello, I am trying to the following. can you let me know how?

1. I have a tab delimited file. I need to enclose the first field in double quotes.

2. I need to replace the tab with comma.

Thanks for the help.

 

[PHV]

What have you tried so far and where in your code are you stuck ?
Tips:
man sed
man awk

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

 

[unixwhoopie]

1,$s/\t/,/g will replace tab with ,

however issue is with placing quotes for the first field

I am trying to place " at the end of the first field for all lines but this is not working:

1,$s/,/",/1

 

[feherke]

Hi

So you want to transform this :

[tt]1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9[/tt]

into this :

[tt]"1",2,3
"4",5,6
"7",8,9[/tt]

sed 's/[^\t]*/"&"/;s/\t/,/g' /input/file > /output/file

[gray]# or[/gray]

sed 's/^/"/;s/\t/",/;s/\t/,/g' /input/file > /output/file

[gray]# or[/gray]

awk -F'\t' -vOFS=, '{$1="\""$1"\""}1' /input/file > /output/file

Tested with GNU [tt]sed[/tt] and [tt]gawk[/tt].

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[unixwhoopie]

That worked. Thanks very much.

I have one more question. How can I format date field in a file. I have the 4th field as date and I want all lines to be unique format: dd/mm/yyyy hh:mi:ss

How can I do this? Thanks again.

 

[p5wizard]

try vi? ;-)

If you know which types of date formats occur and are able to distinguish between them, then it can be done with awk functions substr() and/or sub(), gsub() or gensub() if/when available.


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[feherke]

Hi

Or if you have [tt]gawk[/tt], you may use its [tt]mktime()[/tt] and [tt]strftime()[/tt] functions. But we can not tell you how, unless you show us some sample input.

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/