result splitted with a specific character using ksh

Question

I have several input files looking like this and before loop the processing for all the files i would like to get the 1st column in the same line splitted with || .

Input.txt

aa      ,DEC   
bb      ,CHAR       
cc      ,CHAR      
dd      ,DEC    
ee      ,DEC   
ff      ,CHAR     
gg      ,DEC

For my try this is my commands :

cat $1| while read line
do
cle=`echo $line|cut -d"," -f1`
        for elem in $cle 
        do
            echo -n "$elem||"
        done
    fi
done

But the problem I got the || in the end of the output file ;

He is the result I'm looking for in one line :

aa || bb || cc || dd || ee || ff || gg

Does this answer your question? [sh - split string by delimiter](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19930823/sh-split-string-by-delimiter) — tripleee, Oct 08 '20 at 09:35

tripleee · Accepted Answer · 2020-10-08T14:50:53.020

Probably use Awk instead.

awk -F ',' '{ printf "%s%s", sep, $1; sep = "||"; } END { printf "\n" }' "$1"

If you really wanted to use the shell, you can do pretty much the same thing, but it will typically be both clunkier and slower. Definitely prefer the Awk version for any real system.

sep=''
while IFS=',' read -r cle _; do
    printf "%s%s" "$sep" "$cle"
    sep="||"
done <"$1"
printf "\n"

Notice the absence of a useless cat and how the read command itself is perfectly able to split on whatever IFS is set to. (Your example looks like maybe you want to split on whitespace instead, which is the default behavior of both Awk and the shell. Drop the -F ',' or remove the IFS=',', respectively.) You obviously don't need a for loop to iterate over a single value, either. And always quote your variables.

If you want a space after the delimiter, set it to "|| " instead of just "||". Your example is not entirely consistent (or maybe the markup here hides some of your formatting).

This should work for all of `sh`, `ksh`, and `bash`. The latter two have some additional features which you might want to explore, but then your scripts won't be portable to POSIX `sh`. — tripleee, Oct 08 '20 at 09:36

result splitted with a specific character using ksh

1 Answers1