In a bash script, I'm looking for a way to display a text field (probably surrounded by asterisks or something) that is 72 columns wide that the user can type in. I would like to run the script, and at one point set the value of a variable to what this text field returns, newlines included. They would exit text entry with some key sequence or a line with one word, the sentinal value, followed by the enter key. Upon exciting, the variable contains the text, including newlines.
I currently can capture the text using $(cat) or a simple read loop, but I'm looking for an an alternative, or a way to restrict lines to 72 and keep newlines using those methods.
Any ideas?
I ended up going with dialog using the --editbox option after creating a temporary text file. Thank you for the suggestions – broma0
Related
I am using the Linux command pdftotext -layout *.pdf to extract text from some pdf files, for data mining. The resultant text files all reside in a single folder, but they need some pre-processing before they can be used.
Issues
Issue 1: The first value of each row in each file that I am trying to access is a barcode, which can be either a 13-digit GTIN code, or a 5-digit PLU code. The problem here is that the GTIN codes are delineated with a single space character, which is hard to replace with a script, as each row also contains a description field which, naturally, also contains single spaces between words. Here I will need to replace a set of 13 numerals plus a space with the same 13 numerals plus two spaces (at least), so that a later stage of the pre-processing can replace all multiple spaces with a tab character.
Issue 2: Another problem I am facing with this pre-processing is the newlines. There are many blank lines between data rows. Some are single blank lines between the data rows, and some are two or more lines. I want to end up with no blank lines between the data rows, but each row will be delineated by a newline character.
Issue 3: The final resulting files each need to be tab separated value files, for importing into a spreadsheet. Some of the descriptions in the data rows may contain commas, so I am using TSV rather than CSV files. I only need a single tab between each value in the row.
Sample rows
(I have replaced spaces with • and newlines with ¶ characters here for clarity.)
9415077026340•Pams•Sour•Cream•&•Chives•Rice•Crackers•100g•••$1.19¶
¶
¶
9415077026296•Pams•BBQ•Chicken•Rice•Crackers•100g•••$1.19¶
¶
61424••••••••••••Yoghurt•Raisins•kg•••$23.90/kg¶
¶
9415077036349•Pams•Sliced•Peaches•In•Juice•410g•••$1.29¶
Intended result
(I have also replaced tabs with ⇥ characters here for clarity.)
9415077026340⇥Pams•Sour•Cream•&•Chives•Rice•Crackers•100g⇥$1.19¶
9415077026296⇥Pams•BBQ•Chicken•Rice•Crackers•100g⇥$1.19¶
61424⇥Yoghurt•Raisins•kg⇥$23.90/kg¶
9415077036349⇥Pams•Sliced•Peaches•In•Juice•410g⇥$1.29¶
What have I tried?
I am slowly learning more about the various Linux script utilities such as sed / grep / awk / tr, etc. There are many solutions posted in StackOverflow which resolve some of the issues that I am facing, but they are disparate and confusing when I attempt to string them all together in the way that I need them. Some are "close, but not quite" solutions, such as replacing all double newlines with a single newline between each data row. I don't need the extra row between them. I have been looking and trying several different options that are close to what I need. It would be helpful if someone could propose a solution which uses a single utility, such as sed, to solve all of the issues at once.
I got a CSV file from my front-end as a XString and after I convert it into String it looks as follows:
In the next step I'm trying to perform SPLIT lv_string AT '##' INTO TABLE itab so I can get my data but it doesn't split anything, itab contains one line equal to lv_string.
If I try REPLACE '#' IN lv_string WITH space, lv_string doesn't change and sy-subrc is 4.
From my point of view I have this problem because the symbol # is used by SAP in this context as a symbol for non-printable symbols (that result from the conversion byte->string).
My question is: how may I use SPLIT/REPLACE with # in this case?
I also thought that I can change the SAP code page when converting XString to String but I already use the SAP code page 4110 (utf-8) and don't know a better alternative...
When you display a variable with the debugger, it displays the generic character # (U+0023) for all control characters which are not assigned a glyph ("non-printable symbols" as you say).
If the variable corresponds to the contents of a text file, and ## frequently occurs, there is a big chance that it's the combination of the control characters U+000D and U+000A which correspond to "newline" in Windows files.
In the backend debugger, you can check the hexadecimal values of those characters by clicking the button "Hexadezimal" (shown in your screenshot).
You may use the variable CL_ABAP_CHAR_UTILITIES=>CR_LF which contains those two control characters.
I have my bash shell script working but I need to take into account the use case where when I read user input it will contain valid white spaces between the words. It can be multiple word so I need to either need a way to read the entire line and parse them or change it that the enter a search string as a unique entry and save it for input to my grep search
Example 1 time out
Example 2 fails to start
Example 3 device failed to respond
Thanks!
I have been using nano to write a bash script and I am at several times indenting various lines at once with Alt + }. The problem is that the following occurs:
Several lines without text in them get white-spaces by the amount that I indent the text and they are coloured green. They don't affect the program but they make it look bad. I have been deleting them one by one but it gets frustrating over time. Is there a way to get rid of all the white-spaces at once? maybe some way to select the text (short cut for selecting text in nano is Alt + a) and have a short cut do it?
Use global search and replace with the expression ^\s+$.
Switch to search and replace mode with C-\.
Switch to regex mode with Alt-R.
Type the expression ^\s+$.
Hit Enter to replace with an empty string.
On the match, hit A for All.
I'm using VB6 and ADO together with the Microsoft Text Driver to import data from an ASCII file. The file is comma delimited but it also contains double quotation marks around text data fields. The fields are also fixed width.
I'm having a problem that the driver reads the columns incorrectly any time one of the rows contains a quotation mark double quotation inside the content. This happens inside the "part description" column which is the second column from the left. When this occurs, columns to the right are all Null value, which is not the case in the text file.
I think it would be better to use only the commas as delimiters. However, I believe that commas also occur in the "part description" column so this means I should really load the file as fixed width. I'm not aware that there is any way of doing this unless I can specify this in the schema.ini file.
Any ideas on how to resolve this?
Edit:
You are allowed to specify fixed width in your Schema.ini file. However, it appears to me that the commas and quotation marks that also exist as delimiters/qualifiers will prevent this from working properly. It looks like I may have to "manually" read the file in and write it back out in my own format before I load it using the MS Text driver. Still looking for other opinions.
I would try changing the Format value in the registry for the Jet text engine (if that's what you're using) at the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Text. I think the default is CSVDelimited but you would change this to FixedLength. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974559.aspx
It's probably worth adding that although you have a Schema.ini file for settings, on some options the registry overrules them anyway
Actually, looking at the link I supplied, it seems you have to use a schema.ini file for fixed-length files. Have you tried something like the following, which specifies the width?
[Test.txt]
Format=FixedLength
Col1=FirstName Text Width 7
Col2=LastName Text Width 10
Col3=ID Text Integer 3
I'm extra precautious with regional settings -- some users change default list separator. Usualy fix this with schema.ini like this:
[MyFile.csv]
Format=Delimited(,)