I have a .csv file that contains double quoted multi-line fields. I need to convert the multi-line cell to a single line. It doesn't show in the sample data but I do not know which fields might be multi-line so any solution will need to check every field. I do know how many columns I'll have. The first line will also need to be skipped. I don't how much data so performance isn't a consideration.
I need something that I can run from a bash script on Linux. Preferably using tools such as awk or sed and not actual programming languages.
The data will be processed further with Logstash but it doesn't handle double quoted multi-line fields hence the need to do some pre-processing.
I tried something like this and it kind of works on one row but fails on multiple rows.
sed -e :0 -e '/,.*,.*,.*,.*,/b' -e N -e '1n;N;N;N;s/\n/ /g' -e b0 file.csv
CSV example
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",12345
The output I want is
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,Country City Street,12345
Jane,Doe,Country City Street,67890
etc.
etc.
First my apologies for getting here 7 months late...
I came across a problem similar to yours today, with multiple fields with multi-line types. I was glad to find your question but at least for my case I have the complexity that, as more than one field is conflicting, quotes might open, close and open again on the same line... anyway, reading a lot and combining answers from different posts I came up with something like this:
First I count the quotes in a line, to do that, I take out everything but quotes and then use wc:
quotes=`echo $line | tr -cd '"' | wc -c` # Counts the quotes
If you think of a single multi-line field, knowing if the quotes are 1 or 2 is enough. In a more generic scenario like mine I have to know if the number of quotes is odd or even to know if the line completes the record or expects more information.
To check for even or odd you can use the mod operand (%), in general:
even % 2 = 0
odd % 2 = 1
For the first line:
Odd means that the line expects more information on the next line.
Even means the line is complete.
For the subsequent lines, I have to know the status of the previous one. for instance in your sample text:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",12345
You can say line 1 (John,Doe,"Country) has 1 quote (odd) what means the status of the record is incomplete or open.
When you go to line 2, there is no quote (even). Nevertheless this does not mean the record is complete, you have to consider the previous status... so for the lines following the first one it will be:
Odd means that record status toggles (incomplete to complete).
Even means that record status remains as the previous line.
What I did was looping line by line while carrying the status of the last line to the next one:
incomplete=0
cat file.csv | while read line; do
quotes=`echo $line | tr -cd '"' | wc -c` # Counts the quotes
incomplete=$((($quotes+$incomplete)%2)) # Check if Odd or Even to decide status
if [ $incomplete -eq 1 ]; then
echo -n "$line " >> new.csv # If line is incomplete join with next
else
echo "$line" >> new.csv # If line completes the record finish
fi
done
Once this was executed, a file in your format generates a new.csv like this:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country City Street",12345
I like one-liners as much as everyone, I wrote that script just for the sake of clarity, you can - arguably - write it in one line like:
i=0;cat file.csv|while read l;do i=$((($(echo $l|tr -cd '"'|wc -c)+$i)%2));[[ $i = 1 ]] && echo -n "$l " || echo "$l";done >new.csv
I would appreciate it if you could go back to your example and see if this works for your case (which you most likely already solved). Hopefully this can still help someone else down the road...
Recovering the multi-line fields
Every need is different, in my case I wanted the records in one line to further process the csv to add some bash-extracted data, but I would like to keep the csv as it was. To accomplish that, instead of joining the lines with a space I used a code - likely unique - that I could then search and replace:
i=0;cat file.csv|while read l;do i=$((($(echo $l|tr -cd '"'|wc -c)+$i)%2));[[ $i = 1 ]] && echo -n "$l ~newline~ " || echo "$l";done >new.csv
the code is ~newline~, this is totally arbitrary of course.
Then, after doing my processing, I took the csv text file and replaced the coded newlines with real newlines:
sed -i 's/ ~newline~ /\n/g' new.csv
References:
Ternary operator: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3953666/6316852
Count char occurrences: https://stackoverflow.com/a/41119233/6316852
Other peculiar cases: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/complex-bash-string-substitution-of-csv-file-with-multiline-data-937179/
TL;DR
Run this:
i=0;cat file.csv|while read l;do i=$((($(echo $l|tr -cd '"'|wc -c)+$i)%2));[[ $i = 1 ]] && echo -n "$l " || echo "$l";done >new.csv
... and collect results in new.csv
I hope it helps!
If Perl is your option, please try the following:
perl -e '
while (<>) {
$str .= $_;
}
while ($str =~ /("(("")|[^"])*")|((^|(?<=,))[^,]*((?=,)|$))/g) {
if (($el = $&) =~ /^".*"$/s) {
$el =~ s/^"//s; $el =~ s/"$//s;
$el =~ s/""/"/g;
$el =~ s/\s+(?!$)/ /g;
}
push(#ary, $el);
}
foreach (#ary) {
print /\n$/ ? "$_" : "$_,";
}' sample.csv
sample.csv:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",12345
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",67890
Result:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,Country City Street,12345
John,Doe,Country City Street,67890
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed ':a;s/[^,]\+/&/4;tb;N;ba;:b;s/\n\+/ /g;s/"//g' file
Test each line to see that it contains the correct number of fields (in the example that was 4). If there are not enough fields, append the next line and repeat the test. Otherwise, replace the newline(s) by spaces and finally remove the "'s.
N.B. This may be fraught with problems such as ,'s between "'s and quoted "'s.
Try cat -v file.csv. When the file was made with Excel, you might have some luck: When the newlines in a field are a simple \n and the newline at the end is a \r\n (which will look like ^M), parsing is simple.
# delete all newlines and replace the ^M with a new newline.
tr -d "\n" < file.csv| tr "\r" "\n"
# Above two steps with one command
tr "\n\r" " \n" < file.csv
When you want a space between the joined line, you need an additional step.
tr "\n\r" " \n" < file.csv | sed '2,$ s/^ //'
EDIT: #sjaak commented this didn't work is his case.
When your broken lines also have ^M you still can be a lucky (wo-)man.
When your broken field is always the first field in double quotes and you have GNU sed 4.2.2, you can join 2 lines when the first line has exactly one double quote.
sed -rz ':a;s/(\n|^)([^"]*)"([^"]*)\n/\1\2"\3 /;ta' file.csv
Explanation:
-z don't use \n as line endings
:a label for repeating the step after successful replacement
(\n|^) Search after a newline or the very first line
([^"]*) Substring without a "
ta Go back to label a and repeat
awk pattern matching is working.
answer in one line :
awk '/,"/{ORS=" "};/",/{ORS="\n"}{print $0}' YourFile
if you'd like to drop quotes, you could use:
awk '/,"/{ORS=" "};/",/{ORS="\n"}{print $0}' YourFile | sed 's/"//gw NewFile'
but I prefer to keep it.
to explain the code:
/Pattern/ : find pattern in current line.
ORS : indicates the output line record.
$0 : indicates the whole of the current line.
's/OldPattern/NewPattern/': substitude first OldPattern with NewPattern
/g : does the previous action for all OldPattern
/w : write the result to Newfile
I've got files where the extension is a number:
backup.1
backup.2
backup.3
I now need to check what the highest number is and save this number into a variable. (In the case above it would be i=3)
The problems is actually fairly simple in bash. Bash provides a parameter expansion with substring removal that makes it easy to obtain the final number from the filename. It has the form ${var##*.} which simply searches from the left of the string to the last occurrence of '.' removing all character up to, and including the dot, e.g.
var=backup.1
echo ${var##*.}
1
So all you need to is loop over all files matching backup.[0-9]* and keep a max variable holding the highest number seen, e.g.
max=0
for i in backup.[0-9]*; do
[ "${i##*.}" -gt $max ] && max="${i##*.}"
done
echo "max: $max"
Output based on your files,
max: 3
Look things over and let me know if you have further questions.
highest=$(ls backup* | sort -t"." -k2 -n | tail -n1 | sed -r 's/.*\.(.*)/\1/')
My files:
backup.1
backup.2
backup.3
backup.4
backup.5
backup.6
backup.7
backup.8
backup.9
backup.10
Output:
echo "${highest}"
10
Hey basically right now my program gives me this output:
BLABLABLA
TEXTEXOUAIGJIOAJGOAJFKJAFKLAJKLFJKL
TEXT
MORE TEXT OF RANDOM CHARACTER OVER LIMIT
which is a result of for loop. Now here's what i want:
if the string raches over 10 characters, cut the rest and add two dots & colon to the end "..:"
otherwise (if the string has less than 10 characters) fill the gap with spaces so they're alligned
so on the example i provided i'd want something like this as output:
BLABLABLA :
TEXTEXOUA..:
TEXT :
MORE TEXT..:
I also solved the first part of the problem (when its over 10 characters), only the second one gives me trouble.
AMOUNT=definition here, just simplyfying so not including it
for (( i=1; i<="$AMOUNT"; i++ )); do
STRING=definition here, just simplyfying so not including it
DOTS="..:"
STRING_LENGTH=`echo -n "$STRING" | wc -c`
if [ "$STRING_LENGTH" -gt 10 ]
then
#Takes
STRING=`echo -n "${STRING:0:10}"$DOTS`
else
#now i dont know what to do here, how can i take my current $STRING
#and add spaces " " until we reach 10 characters. Any ideas?
fi
Bash provides a simple way to get the length of a string stored in a variable: ${#STRING}
STRING="definition here, just simplyfying so not including it"
if [ ${#STRING} -gt 10 ]; then
STR12="${STRING:0:10}.."
else
STR12="$STRING " # 12 spaces here
STR12="${STR12:0:12}"
fi
echo "$STR12:"
The expected output you posted doesn't match the requirements in the question. I tried to follow the requirements and ignored the sample expected output and the code you posted.
Use printf:
PADDED_STRING=$(printf %-10s $STRING)
So I have a word list containing over 30,000 words. My goals is to make a script that takes in a word without constants in it (example: mbnt), and somehow add constants and compare to the word list to find atleast the word "ambient", though it will also find other words that would read as "mbnt" if you were to take out all of their vowels.
So far this is my bash script
f=/wordList
anyVowel=[aAeEiIoOuU]
nonVowel=[^aAeEiIoOuU]
input=$1
for (( i=0; i<${#input}; i++ ));
do
grep "${input:$i:1}$nonVowel" $f | head -10
done
however this will just return a just a normal list of words with some of the characters the user inputs. Any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong?
awk to the rescue!
$ awk -v w=whr '{a=tolower($0);
gsub(/[^a-z]/,"",a);
gsub(/[aeiou]/,"",a)}
a==w' words
where
looking for the vowels dropped word "whr" in the words (make up a custom dict). Convert to lowercase, filter out non alphas and remove vowels, finally look for a match with the given word.
Note that this is very inefficient if you're looking for many words, but perhaps can be a template for your solution.
Try
wordsfile=wordList
consonants=$1
# Create a regular expression that matches the input consonants with
# any number of vowels before, after, or between them
regex='^[[:space:]]*[aeiou]*'
for (( i=0; i<${#consonants}; i++ )) ; do
regex+="${consonants:i:1}[aeiou]*"
done
regex+='[[:space:]]*$'
grep -i -- "$regex" "$wordsfile"
For example:
((
extract everything here, ignore the rest
))
I know how to ignore everything within, but I don't know how to do the opposite. Basically, it'll be a file and it needs to extract the data between the two points and then output it to another file. I've tried countless approaches, and all seem to tell me the indentation I'm stating doesn't exist in the file, when it does.
If somebody could point me in the right direction, I'd be grateful.
If your data are "line oriented", so the marker is alone (as in the example), you can try some of the following:
function getdata() {
cat - <<EOF
before
((
extract everything here, ignore the rest
someother text
))
after
EOF
}
echo "sed - with two seds"
getdata | sed -n '/((/,/))/p' | sed '1d;$d'
echo "Another sed solution"
getdata | sed -n '1,/((/d; /))/,$d;p'
echo "With GNU sed"
getdata | gsed -n '/((/{:a;n;/))/b;p;ba}'
echo "With perl"
getdata | perl -0777 -pe "s/.*\(\(\s*\\n(.*)?\)\).*/\$1/s"
Ps: yes, its looks like a dance of crazy toothpicks
Assuming you want to extract the string inside (( and )):
VAR="abc((def))ghi"
echo "$VAR"
VAR=${VAR##*((}
VAR=${VAR%%))*}
echo "$VAR"
## cuts away the longest string from the beginning; # cuts away the shortest string from the beginning; %% cuts away the longest string at the end; % cuts away the shortes string at the end
The file :
$ cat /tmp/l
((
extract everything here, ignore the rest
someother text
))
The script
$ awk '$1=="((" {p=1;next} $1=="))" {p=o;next} p' /tmp/l
extract everything here, ignore the rest
someother text
sed -n '/^((/,/^))/ { /^((/b; /^))/b; p }'
Brief explanation:
/^((/,/^))/: range addressing (inclusive)
{ /^((/b; /^))/b; p }: sequence of 3 commands
1. skip line with ^((
2. skip line with ^))
3. print
The line skipping is required to make the range selection exclusive.