Bash Columns SED and BASH Commands without AWK? - bash

Question

I wrote 2 difference scripts but I am stuck at the same problem.
The problem is am making a table from a file ($2) that I get in args and $1 is the numbers of columns. A little bit hard to explain but I am gonna show you input and output.
The problem is now that I don't know how I can save every column now in a difference var so i can build it in my HTML code later
#printf #TR##TD#$...#/TD##TD#$...#/TD##TD#$..#/TD##/TR##TD#$...
so input look like that :
Name\tSize\tType\tprobe
bla\t4711\tfile\t888888888
abcde\t4096\tdirectory\t5555
eeeee\t333333\tblock\t6666
aaaaaa\t111111\tpackage\t7777
sssss\t44444\tfile\t8888
bbbbb\t22222\tfolder\t9999
Code :
c=1
column=$1
file=$2
echo "$( < $file)"| while read Line ; do
Name=$(sed "s/\\\t/ /g" $file | cut -d' ' -f$c,-$column)
printf "$Name \n"
#let c=c+1
#printf "<TR><TD>$Name</TD><TD>$Size</TD><TD>$Type</TD></TR>\n"
exit 0
done
Output:
Name Size Type probe
bla 4711 file 888888888
abcde 4096 directory 5555
eeeee 333333 block 6666
aaaaaa 111111 package 7777
sssss 44444 file 8888
bbbbb 22222 folder 9999

Answer 1

This is tailor-made job for awk. See this script:
awk -F'\t' '{printf "<tr>";for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) printf "<td>%s</td>", $i;print "</tr>"}' input
<tr><td>bla</td><td>4711</td><td>file</td><td>888888888</td></tr>
<tr><td>abcde</td><td>4096</td><td>directory</td><td>5555</td></tr>
<tr><td>eeeee</td><td>333333</td><td>block</td><td>6666</td></tr>
<tr><td>aaaaaa</td><td>111111</td><td>package</td><td>7777</td></tr>
<tr><td>sssss</td><td>44444</td><td>file</td><td>8888</td></tr>
<tr><td>bbbbb</td><td>22222</td><td>folder</td><td>9999</td></tr>

Answer 2

In bash:
celltype=th
while IFS=$'\t' read -a columns; do
rowcontents=$( printf '<%s>%s</%s>' "$celltype" "${columns[#]}" "$celltype" )
printf '<tr>%s</tr>\n' "$rowcontents"
celltype=td
done < <( sed $'s/\\\\t/\t/g' "$2")
Some explanations:
IFS=$'\t' read -a columns reads a line from standard input, using only the tab character to separate fields, and putting each field into a separate element of the array columns. We change IFS so that other whitespace, which could occur in a field, is not treated as a field delimiter.
On the first line read from standard input, <th> elements will be output by the printf line. After resetting the value of celltype at the end of the loop body, all subsequent rows will consist of <td> elements.
When setting the value of rowcontents, take advantage of the fact that the first argument is repeated as many times as necessary to consume all the arguments.
Input is via process substitution from the sed command, which requires a crazy amount of quoting. First, the entire argument is quoted with $'...', which tells bash to replace escaped characters. bash converts this to the literal string s/\\t/^T/g, where I am using ^T to represent a literal ASCII 09 tab character. When sed sees this argument, it performs its own escape replacement, so the search text is a literal backslash followed by a literal t, to be replaced by a literal tab character.
The first argument, the column count, is unnecessary and is ignored.
Normally, you avoid making the while loop part of a pipeline because you set parameters in the loop that you want to use later. Here, all the variables are truly local to the while loop, so you could avoid the process substitution and use a pipeline if you wish:
sed $'s/\\\\t/\t/g' "$2" | while IFS=$'\t' read -a columns; do
...
done