Make lines from a file into rows

Question

I have file as below;

roger
"supplier"
anger
"easter"
robin
"badguy"
sweety
"i like you"
goldy
"I hate you"

I need this file to be converted into something like

roger|supplier
anger|easter
robin|badguy
sweety|i like you
goldy|I hate you

Please help, I am thing of putting it thru a awhile loop and read them into 2 different files and then concatenate the files. I know that's not a great idea hence posting for some suggestions.

this is kind of a vague question, but sounds like a job for awk — RishiG, Dec 06 '13 at 17:43
possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3194534/joining-two-consecutive-lines-awk-sed — AlG, Dec 06 '13 at 17:50
@user2999920: the file that i have currently is in format: process_name process_desc which i need in one single line as process_name|process_desc — user3040077, Dec 06 '13 at 17:53
@AlG: I feel its a little different, but i am looking at the solutions offered in there. thanks for the link — user3040077, Dec 06 '13 at 17:55

Chris Seymour · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-06T18:04:23.033

One way with awk:

$ awk 'NR%2{a=$0;next}{print a,$2}' FS='"' OFS='|' file
roger|supplier
anger|easter
robin|badguy
sweety|i like you
goldy|I hate you

Or slightly shorter with xargs and sed:

$ xargs -n2 < file | sed 's/ /|/'
roger|supplier
anger|easter
robin|badguy
sweety|i like you
goldy|I hate you

Or just sed:

$ sed '$!N;s/\n/|/;s/"//g' file
roger|supplier
anger|easter
robin|badguy
sweety|i like you
goldy|I hate you

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 06 '13 at 17:56

How's this?

echo 'roger
"supplier"
anger
"easter"
robin
"badguy"
sweety
"i like you"
goldy
"I hate you"' \
| awk '{
   if (NR%2){
     printf("%s", $0)
   }
   else {
     gsub(/"/,"", $0);printf("|%s\n", $0)
   }
 }'

output

roger|supplier
anger|easter
robin|badguy
sweety|i like you
goldy|I hate you

Make lines from a file into rows

2 Answers2