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Home > Forums > MIS/IT > Operating Systems - UNIX based > -General UNIX discussion Forum

replacing tab with comma and enclosing double quotes

thread80-1478126
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unixwhoopie (Programmer)
4 Jun 08 15:23
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 (MIS)
4 Jun 08 15:26
What have you tried so far and where in your code are you stuck ?
Tips:
man sed
man awk

Hope This Helps, PH.
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unixwhoopie (Programmer)
4 Jun 08 21:51
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 (Programmer)
5 Jun 08 2:12
Hi

So you want to transform this :

1       2       3
4       5       6
7       8       9

into this :

"1",2,3
"4",5,6
"7",8,9

CODE

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

# or

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

# or

awk -F'\t' -vOFS=, '{$1="\""$1"\""}1' /input/file > /output/file
Tested with GNU sed and gawk.

Feherke.
http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

unixwhoopie (Programmer)
5 Jun 08 15:33
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 (IS/IT--Management)
5 Jun 08 16:00
try vi? winky smile

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 (Programmer)
6 Jun 08 3:55
Hi

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

Feherke.
http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

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