Display column from empty column (fixed width and space delimited) in bash - bash

Question

I have log file (in txt) with the following text
UNIT PHYS STATE LOCATION INFO
TCSM-1098 SE-NH -
ETPE-5-0 1403 SE-OU BCSU-1 ACTV FLTY
ETIP-6 1402 SE-NH -
They r delimited by space...
How am I acquired the output like below?
UNIT|PHYS|STATE|LOCATION|INFO
TCSM-1098||SE-NH||-
ETPE-5-0|1403|SE-OU|BCSU-1|ACTV FLTY
ETIP-6|1402|SE-NH||-
Thank in advance
This is what I've tried so far
cat file.txt | awk 'BEGIN { FS = "[[:space:]][[:space:]]+" } {print $1,$2,$3,$4}' | sed 's/ /|/g'
It produces output like this
|UNIT|PHYS|STATE|LOCATION|INFO|
|TCSM-1098|SE-NH|-|
|ETPE-5-0|1403|SE-OU|BCSU-1|ACTV|FLTY
|ETIP-6|1402|SE-NH|-|
The column isn't excatly like what I hope for

Answer 1

It seems it's not delimited but fixed-width format.
$ perl -ple '
$_ = join "|",
map {s/^\s+|\s+$//g;$_}
unpack ("a11 a5 a6 a22 a30",$_);
' <file.txt
how it works
-p switch : loop over input lines (default var: $_) and print it
-l switch : chomp line ending (\n) and add it to output
-e : inline command
unpack function : takes defined format and input line and returns an array
map function : apply block to each element of array: regex to remove heading trailing spaces
join function : takes delimiter and array and gives string
$_ = : affects the string to default var for output

Answer 2

Perl to the rescue!
perl -wE 'my #lengths;
$_ = <>;
push #lengths, length $1 while /(\S+\s*)/g;
$lengths[-1] = "*";
my $f;
say join "|",
map s/^\s+|\s+$//gr,
unpack "A" . join("A", #lengths), $_
while (!$f++ or $_ = <>);' -- infile
The format is not whitespace separated, it's a fixed-width.
The #lengths array will be populated by the widths of the columns taken from the first line of the input. The last column width is replaced with *, as its width can't be deduced from the header.
Then, an unpack template is created from the lengths that's used to parse the file.
$f is just a flag that makes it possible to apply the template to the header line itself.

Answer 3

With GNU awk for FIELDWITDHS to handle fixed-width fields:
awk -v FIELDWIDTHS='11 5 6 22 99' -v OFS='|' '{$1=$1; gsub(/ *\| */,"|"); sub(/ +$/,"")}1' file
UNIT|PHYS|STATE|LOCATION|INFO
TCSM-1098||SE-NH||-
ETPE-5-0|1403|SE-OU|BCSU-1|ACTV FLTY
ETIP-6|1402|SE-NH||-
I think it's pretty clear and self-explanatory but let me know if you have any questions.

Answer 4

Manually, in awk:
$ awk 'BEGIN{split("11 5 6 23 99", cols); }
{s=0;
for (i in cols) {
field = substr($0, s, cols[i]);
s += cols[i];
sub(/^ */, "", field);
sub(/ *$/, "", field);
printf "%s|", field;
};
printf "\n" } ' file
UNIT|PHYS|STATE|LOCATION|INFO|
TCSM-1098||SE-NH||-|
ETPE-5-0|1403|SE-OU|BCSU-1|ACTV FLTY|
ETIP-6|1402|SE-NH||-|
The widths of the columns are set in the BEGIN block, then for each line we take substrings of the line of the required length. s counts the starting position of the current column, the sub() calls remove leading and trailing spaces. The code as such prints a trailing | on each line, but that can be worked around by making the first or last column a special case.
Note that the last field is not like in your output, it's hard to tell where the split between ACTV and FLTY should be. Is that fixed width too, or is the space a separator there?