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

[dennisjperkins at comcast.net]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Collins Richey" <crichey at gmail.com> 
To: "CLUE technical discussion" <clue-tech at cluedenver.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, October 6, 2010 5:36:39 PM 
Subject: Re: [clue-tech] [spam?] text processing howto 

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 7:36 AM, Jim Ockers <ockers at ockers.net> wrote: 
> 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... :-) 
> 

You can do the same thing in two lines of perl. I won't bore you with 
the power of pcre engines, but this has been adopted by the likes of 
php, ruby, and even Windows Powershell (ugh!!!). 

BTW, I would love to see a thorough presentation of AWK as a topic for 
a CLUE meeting. AWK is indeed a powreful utility, but I, for one, have 
always been too lazy to learn it! 


-- 
Collins Richey 
If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries 
of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for. 
_______________________________________________ 

That's a good idea. I've written complex programs in awk and I've done one-liners. I've never tried to give a talk on it. How thorough would you like? 

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