I have a text file: file.txt, with several thousand lines. It contains a lot of junk lines which I am not interested in, so I use the cut command to regex for the lines I am interested in first. For each entry I am interested in, it will be listed twice in the text file: Once in a "definition" section, another in a "value" section. I want to retrieve the first value from the "definition" section, and then for each entry found there find it's corresponding "value" section entry.
The first entry starts with ' gl_ ', while the 2nd entry would look like ' "gl_ ', starting with a '"'.
This is the code I have so far for looping through the text document, which then retrieves the values I am interested in and appends them to a .csv file:
while read -r line
do
if [[ $line == gl_* ]] ; then (param=$(cut -d'\' -f 1 $line) | def=$(cut -d'\' -f 2 $line) | type=$(cut -d'\' -f 4 $line) | prompt=$(cut -d'\' -f 8 $line))
while read -r glline
do
if [[ $glline == '"'$param* ]] ; then val=$(cut -d'\' -f 3 $glline) |
"$project";"$param";"$val";"$def";"$type";"$prompt" >> /filepath/file.csv
done < file.txt
done < file.txt
This seems to throw some syntax errors related to unexpected tokens near the first 'done' statement.
Example of text that needs to be parsed, and paired:
gl_one\User Defined\1\String\1\\1\Some Text
gl_two\User Defined\1\String\1\\1\Some Text also
gl_three\User Defined\1\Time\1\\1\Datetime now
some\junk
"gl_one\1\Value1
some\junk
"gl_two\1\Value2
"gl_three\1\Value3
So effectively, the while loop reads each line until it hits the first line that starts with 'gl_', which then stores that value (ie. gl_one) as a variable 'param'.
It then starts the nested while loop that looks for the line that starts with a ' " ' in front of the gl_, and is equivalent to the 'param' value. In other words, the
script should couple the lines gl_one and "gl_one, gl_two and "gl_two, gl_three and "gl_three.
The text file is large, and these are settings that have been defined this way. I need to collect the values for each gl_ parameter, to save them together in a .csv file with their corresponding "gl_ values.
Wanted regex output stored in variables would be something like this:
first while loop:
$param = gl_one, $def = User Defined, $type = String, $prompt = Some Text
second while loop:
$val = Value1
Then it stores these variables to the file.csv, with semi-colon separators.
Currently, I have an error for the first 'done' statement, which seems to indicate an issue with the quotation marks. Apart from this,
I am looking for general ideas and comments to the script. I.e, not entirely sure I am looking for the quotation mark parameters "gl_ correctly, or if the
semi-colons as .csv separators are added correctly.
Edit: Overall, the script runs now, but extremely slow due to the inner while loop. Is there any faster way to match the two lines together and add them to the .csv file?
Any ideas and comments?
This will generate a file containing the data you want:
cat file.txt | grep gl_ | sed -E "s/\"//" | sort | sed '$!N;s/\n/\\/' | awk -F'\' '{print $1"; "$5"; "$7"; "$NF}' > /filepath/file.csv
It uses grep to extract all lines containing 'gl_'
then sed to remove the leading '"' from the lines that contain one [I have assumed there are no further '"' in the line]
The lines are sorted
sed removes the return from each pair of lines
awk then prints
the required columns according to your requirements
Output routed to the file.
LANG=C sort -t\\ -sd -k1,1 <file.txt |\
sed '
/^gl_/{ # if definition
N; # append next line to buffer
s/\n"gl_[^\\]*//; # if value, strip first column
t; # and start next loop
}
D; # otherwise, delete the line
' |\
awk -F\\ -v p="$project" -v OFS=\; '{print p,$1,$10,$2,$4,$8 }' \
>>/filepath/file.csv
sort lines so gl_... appears immediately before "gl_... (LANG fixes LC_TYPE) - assumes definition appears before value
sed to help ensure matching definition and value (may still fail if duplicate/missing value), and tidy for awk
awk to pull out relevant fields
I have 2 files refer.txt and parse.txt
refer.txt contains the following
julie,remo,rob,whitney,james
parse.txt contains
remo/hello/1.0,remo/hello2/2.0,remo/hello3/3.0,whitney/hello/1.0,julie/hello/2.0,julie/hello/3.0,rob/hello/4.0,james/hello/6.0
Now my output.txt should list the files in parse.txt based on the order specified in refer.txt
ex of output.txt should be:
julie/hello/2.0,julie/hello/3.0,remo/hello/1.0,remo/hello2/2.0,remo/hello3/3.0,rob/hello/4.0,whitney/hello/1.0,james/hello/6.0
i have tried the following code:
sort -nru refer.txt parse.txt
but no luck.
please assist me.TIA
You can do that using gnu-awk:
awk -F/ -v RS=',|\n' 'FNR==NR{a[$1] = (a[$1])? a[$1] "," $0 : $0 ; next}
{s = (s)? s "," a[$1] : a[$1]} END{print s}' parse.txt refer.txt
Output:
julie/hello/2.0,julie/hello/3.0,remo/hello/1.0,remo/hello2/2.0,remo/hello3/3.0,rob/hello/4.0,whitney/hello/1.0,james/hello/6.0
Explanation:
-F/ # Use field separator as /
-v RS=',|\n' # Use record separator as comma or newline
NR == FNR { # While processing parse.txt
a[$1]=(a[$1])?a[$1] ","$0:$0 # create an array with 1st field as key and value as all the
# records with keys julie, remo, rob etc.
}
{ # while processing the second file refer.txt
s = (s)?s "," a[$1]:a[$1] # aggregate all values by reading key from 2nd file
}
END {print s } # print all the values
In pure native bash (4.x):
# read each file into an array
IFS=, read -r -a values <parse.txt
IFS=, read -r -a ordering <refer.txt
# create a map from content before "/" to comma-separated full values in preserved order
declare -A kv=( )
for value in "${values[#]}"; do
key=${value%%/*}
if [[ ${kv[$key]} ]]; then
kv[$key]+=",$value" # already exists, comma-separate
else
kv[$key]="$value"
fi
done
# go through refer list, putting full value into "out" array for each entry
out=( )
for value in "${ordering[#]}"; do
out+=( "${kv[$value]}" )
done
# print "out" array in comma-separated form
IFS=,
printf '%s\n' "${out[*]}" >output.txt
If you're getting more output fields than you have input fields, you're probably trying to run this with bash 3.x. Since associative array support is mandatory for correct operation, this won't work.
tr , "\n" refer.txt | cat -n >person_id.txt # 'cut -n' not posix, use sed and paste
cat person_id.txt | while read person_id person_key
do
print "$person_id" > $person_key
done
tr , "\n" parse.txt | sed 's/(^[^\/]*)(\/.*)$/\1 \1\2/' >person_data.txt
cat person_data.txt | while read foreign_key person_data
do
person_id="$(<$foreign_key)"
print "$person_id" " " "$person_data" >>merge.txt
done
sort merge.txt >output.txt
A text book data processing approach, a person id table, a person data table, merged on a common key field, which is the first name of the person:
[person_key] [person_id]
- person id table, a unique sortable 'id' for each person (line number in this instance, since that is the desired sort order), and key for each person (their first name)
[person_key] [person_data]
- person data table, the data for each person indexed by 'person_key'
[person_id] [person_data]
- a merge of the 'person_id' table and 'person_data' table on 'person_key', which can then be sorted on person_id, giving the output as requested
The trick is to implement an associative array using files, the file name being the key (in this instance 'person_key'), the content being the value. [Essentially a random access file implemented using the filesystem.]
This actually adds a step to the otherwise simple but not very efficient task of grepping parse.txt with each value in refer.txt - which is more efficient I'm not sure.
NB: The above code is very unlikely to work out of the box.
NBB: On reflection, probably a better way of doing this would be to use the file system to create a random access file of parse.txt (essentially an index), and to then consider refer.txt as a batch file, submitting it as a job as such, printing out from the parse.txt random access file the data for each of the names read in from refer.txt in turn:
# 1) index data file on required field
cat person_data.txt | while read data
do
key="$(print "$data" | sed 's/(^[^\/]*)/\1/')" # alt. `cut -d'/' -f1` ??
print "$data" >>./person_data/"$key"
done
# 2) run batch job
cat refer_data.txt | while read key
do
print ./person_data/"$key"
done
However having said that, using egrep is probably just as rigorous a solution or at least for small datasets, I would most certainly use this approach given the specific question posed. (Or maybe not! The above could well prove faster as well as being more robust.)
Command
while read line; do
grep -w "^$line" <(tr , "\n" < parse.txt)
done < <(tr , "\n" < refer.txt) | paste -s -d , -
Key points
For both files, newlines are translated to commas using the tr command (without actually changing the files themselves). This is useful because while read and grep work under the assumption that your records are separated by newlines instead of commas.
while read will read in every name from refer.txt, (i.e julie, remo, etc.) and then use grep to retrieve lines from parse.txt containing that name.
The ^ in the regex ensures matching is only performed from the start of the string and not in the middle (thanks to #CharlesDuffy's comment below), and the -w option for grep allows whole-word matching only. For example, this ensures that "rob" only matches "rob/..." and not "robby/..." or "throb/...".
The paste command at the end will comma-separate the results. Removing this command will print each result on its own line.
If I have a csv file, is there a quick bash way to print out the contents of only any single column? It is safe to assume that each row has the same number of columns, but each column's content would have different length.
You could use awk for this. Change '$2' to the nth column you want.
awk -F "\"*,\"*" '{print $2}' textfile.csv
yes. cat mycsv.csv | cut -d ',' -f3 will print 3rd column.
The simplest way I was able to get this done was to just use csvtool. I had other use cases as well to use csvtool and it can handle the quotes or delimiters appropriately if they appear within the column data itself.
csvtool format '%(2)\n' input.csv
Replacing 2 with the column number will effectively extract the column data you are looking for.
Landed here looking to extract from a tab separated file. Thought I would add.
cat textfile.tsv | cut -f2 -s
Where -f2 extracts the 2, non-zero indexed column, or the second column.
Here is a csv file example with 2 columns
myTooth.csv
Date,Tooth
2017-01-25,wisdom
2017-02-19,canine
2017-02-24,canine
2017-02-28,wisdom
To get the first column, use:
cut -d, -f1 myTooth.csv
f stands for Field and d stands for delimiter
Running the above command will produce the following output.
Output
Date
2017-01-25
2017-02-19
2017-02-24
2017-02-28
To get the 2nd column only:
cut -d, -f2 myTooth.csv
And here is the output
Output
Tooth
wisdom
canine
canine
wisdom
incisor
Another use case:
Your csv input file contains 10 columns and you want columns 2 through 5 and columns 8, using comma as the separator".
cut uses -f (meaning "fields") to specify columns and -d (meaning "delimiter") to specify the separator. You need to specify the latter because some files may use spaces, tabs, or colons to separate columns.
cut -f 2-5,8 -d , myvalues.csv
cut is a command utility and here is some more examples:
SYNOPSIS
cut -b list [-n] [file ...]
cut -c list [file ...]
cut -f list [-d delim] [-s] [file ...]
I think the easiest is using csvkit:
Gets the 2nd column:
csvcut -c 2 file.csv
However, there's also csvtool, and probably a number of other csv bash tools out there:
sudo apt-get install csvtool (for Debian-based systems)
This would return a column with the first row having 'ID' in it.
csvtool namedcol ID csv_file.csv
This would return the fourth row:
csvtool col 4 csv_file.csv
If you want to drop the header row:
csvtool col 4 csv_file.csv | sed '1d'
First we'll create a basic CSV
[dumb#one pts]$ cat > file
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
Then we get the 1st column
[dumb#one pts]$ awk -F , '{print $1}' file
a
1
a
1
Many answers for this questions are great and some have even looked into the corner cases.
I would like to add a simple answer that can be of daily use... where you mostly get into those corner cases (like having escaped commas or commas in quotes etc.,).
FS (Field Separator) is the variable whose value is dafaulted to
space. So awk by default splits at space for any line.
So using BEGIN (Execute before taking input) we can set this field to anything we want...
awk 'BEGIN {FS = ","}; {print $3}'
The above code will print the 3rd column in a csv file.
The other answers work well, but since you asked for a solution using just the bash shell, you can do this:
AirBoxOmega:~ d$ cat > file #First we'll create a basic CSV
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
And then you can pull out columns (the first in this example) like so:
AirBoxOmega:~ d$ while IFS=, read -a csv_line;do echo "${csv_line[0]}";done < file
a
1
a
1
a
1
a
1
a
1
a
1
So there's a couple of things going on here:
while IFS=, - this is saying to use a comma as the IFS (Internal Field Separator), which is what the shell uses to know what separates fields (blocks of text). So saying IFS=, is like saying "a,b" is the same as "a b" would be if the IFS=" " (which is what it is by default.)
read -a csv_line; - this is saying read in each line, one at a time and create an array where each element is called "csv_line" and send that to the "do" section of our while loop
do echo "${csv_line[0]}";done < file - now we're in the "do" phase, and we're saying echo the 0th element of the array "csv_line". This action is repeated on every line of the file. The < file part is just telling the while loop where to read from. NOTE: remember, in bash, arrays are 0 indexed, so the first column is the 0th element.
So there you have it, pulling out a column from a CSV in the shell. The other solutions are probably more practical, but this one is pure bash.
You could use GNU Awk, see this article of the user guide.
As an improvement to the solution presented in the article (in June 2015), the following gawk command allows double quotes inside double quoted fields; a double quote is marked by two consecutive double quotes ("") there. Furthermore, this allows empty fields, but even this can not handle multiline fields. The following example prints the 3rd column (via c=3) of textfile.csv:
#!/bin/bash
gawk -- '
BEGIN{
FPAT="([^,\"]*)|(\"((\"\")*[^\"]*)*\")"
}
{
if (substr($c, 1, 1) == "\"") {
$c = substr($c, 2, length($c) - 2) # Get the text within the two quotes
gsub("\"\"", "\"", $c) # Normalize double quotes
}
print $c
}
' c=3 < <(dos2unix <textfile.csv)
Note the use of dos2unix to convert possible DOS style line breaks (CRLF i.e. "\r\n") and UTF-16 encoding (with byte order mark) to "\n" and UTF-8 (without byte order mark), respectively. Standard CSV files use CRLF as line break, see Wikipedia.
If the input may contain multiline fields, you can use the following script. Note the use of special string for separating records in output (since the default separator newline could occur within a record). Again, the following example prints the 3rd column (via c=3) of textfile.csv:
#!/bin/bash
gawk -- '
BEGIN{
RS="\0" # Read the whole input file as one record;
# assume there is no null character in input.
FS="" # Suppose this setting eases internal splitting work.
ORS="\n####\n" # Use a special output separator to show borders of a record.
}
{
nof=patsplit($0, a, /([^,"\n]*)|("(("")*[^"]*)*")/, seps)
field=0;
for (i=1; i<=nof; i++){
field++
if (field==c) {
if (substr(a[i], 1, 1) == "\"") {
a[i] = substr(a[i], 2, length(a[i]) - 2) # Get the text within
# the two quotes.
gsub(/""/, "\"", a[i]) # Normalize double quotes.
}
print a[i]
}
if (seps[i]!=",") field=0
}
}
' c=3 < <(dos2unix <textfile.csv)
There is another approach to the problem. csvquote can output contents of a CSV file modified so that special characters within field are transformed so that usual Unix text processing tools can be used to select certain column. For example the following code outputs the third column:
csvquote textfile.csv | cut -d ',' -f 3 | csvquote -u
csvquote can be used to process arbitrary large files.
I needed proper CSV parsing, not cut / awk and prayer. I'm trying this on a mac without csvtool, but macs do come with ruby, so you can do:
echo "require 'csv'; CSV.read('new.csv').each {|data| puts data[34]}" | ruby
I wonder why none of the answers so far have mentioned csvkit.
csvkit is a suite of command-line tools for converting to and working
with CSV
csvkit documentation
I use it exclusively for csv data management and so far I have not found a problem that I could not solve using cvskit.
To extract one or more columns from a cvs file you can use the csvcut utility that is part of the toolbox. To extract the second column use this command:
csvcut -c 2 filename_in.csv > filename_out.csv
csvcut reference page
If the strings in the csv are quoted, add the quote character with the q option:
csvcut -q '"' -c 2 filename_in.csv > filename_out.csv
Install with pip install csvkit or sudo apt install csvkit.
Simple solution using awk. Instead of "colNum" put the number of column you need to print.
cat fileName.csv | awk -F ";" '{ print $colNum }'
csvtool col 2 file.csv
where 2 is the column you are interested in
you can also do
csvtool col 1,2 file.csv
to do multiple columns
You can't do it without a full CSV parser.
If you know your data will not be quoted, then any solution that splits on , will work well (I tend to reach for cut -d, -f1 | sed 1d), as will any of the CSV manipulation tools.
If you want to produce another CSV file, then xsv, csvkit, csvtool, or other CSV manipulation tools are appropriate.
If you want to extract the contents of one single column of a CSV file, unquoting them so that they can be processed by subsequent commands, this Python 1-liner does the trick for CSV files with headers:
python -c 'import csv,sys'$'\n''for row in csv.DictReader(sys.stdin): print(row["message"])'
The "message" inside of the print function selects the column.
If the CSV file doesn't have headers:
python -c 'import csv,sys'$'\n''for row in csv.reader(sys.stdin): print(row[1])'
Python's CSV library supports all kinds of CSV dialects, so if your CSV file uses different conventions, it's possible to support them with relatively little change to the code.
Been using this code for a while, it is not "quick" unless you count "cutting and pasting from stackoverflow".
It uses ${##} and ${%%} operators in a loop instead of IFS. It calls 'err' and 'die', and supports only comma, dash, and pipe as SEP chars (that's all I needed).
err() { echo "${0##*/}: Error:" "$#" >&2; }
die() { err "$#"; exit 1; }
# Return Nth field in a csv string, fields numbered starting with 1
csv_fldN() { fldN , "$1" "$2"; }
# Return Nth field in string of fields separated
# by SEP, fields numbered starting with 1
fldN() {
local me="fldN: "
local sep="$1"
local fldnum="$2"
local vals="$3"
case "$sep" in
-|,|\|) ;;
*) die "$me: arg1 sep: unsupported separator '$sep'" ;;
esac
case "$fldnum" in
[0-9]*) [ "$fldnum" -gt 0 ] || { err "$me: arg2 fldnum=$fldnum must be number greater or equal to 0."; return 1; } ;;
*) { err "$me: arg2 fldnum=$fldnum must be number"; return 1;} ;;
esac
[ -z "$vals" ] && err "$me: missing arg2 vals: list of '$sep' separated values" && return 1
fldnum=$(($fldnum - 1))
while [ $fldnum -gt 0 ] ; do
vals="${vals#*$sep}"
fldnum=$(($fldnum - 1))
done
echo ${vals%%$sep*}
}
Example:
$ CSVLINE="example,fields with whitespace,field3"
$ $ for fno in $(seq 3); do echo field$fno: $(csv_fldN $fno "$CSVLINE"); done
field1: example
field2: fields with whitespace
field3: field3
You can also use while loop
IFS=,
while read name val; do
echo "............................"
echo Name: "$name"
done<itemlst.csv