[clue-tech] [spam?] text processing howto

[Jim Ockers]

Hi David,

[ockers at agadez ~]$ echo "this that1 that2 that3 theotherthing" | awk 
'{print $NF}'
theotherthing

[ockers at agadez ~]$ echo "this that1 that2 that3 theotherthing" | awk 
'{print $2 "," $3 "," $4}'
that1,that2,that3

NF means "number of fields" and is a numerical value equal to the number 
of whitespace-separated list items.  Obviously "theotherthing" is $5.  
Also -F command line option to awk indicates the field separator, by 
default it uses whitespace as the field separator.

If you want to do something fancy you should know that awk is very 
powerful and supports "for" loops.  If you want to know the loop 
iterator syntax I can suggest that too, but you didn't ask for that.

No perl! :)  awk is great for simple text processing.

HTH,
Jim

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: http://www.ockers.ca/pason.html


David L. Willson wrote:
> given lines of the form:
>     this that1 that2 that3 theotherthing
>
> where the field separator is any combination of spaces and tabs
> and there may be 0-9 that's
>
> how do I reliably capture theotherthing, and make a packed, 
> comma-separated list of all the that's.
>
> This is where I really wish I'd paid more attention in perl class.
> Bonus point for not using any perl...  :-)
>
> David L. Willson
> Trainer, Engineer, Enthusiast
> MCT MSCE Network+ A+ Linux+ LPIC-1 NovellCLA UbuntuCP
> tel://720.333.LANS
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