Gawk Line removal, Splitter is :

Question

Is it possible to move certain columns from one .txt file into another .txt file?

I have a .txt that contains:

USERID:ORDER#:IP:PHONE:ADDRESS:POSTCODE
USERID:ORDER#:IP:PHONE:ADDRESS:POSTCODE

With gawk I want to extract ADDRESS & POSTCODE columns into another .txt, so for this given file the output should be:

ADDRESS1:POSTCODE1
ADDRESS2:POSTCODE2

etc.

I'm lost: do you want the output on separate lines? because it wasn't the case at first. — Jean-François Fabre, Aug 20 '16 at 16:30
The briefest glance at an awk man page or tutorial would show you how to do that. Put **SOME** effort into solving problems yourself. — Ed Morton, Aug 20 '16 at 17:46

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 20 '16 at 14:06

0

Try that:

awk -F: '{printf "%s:%s ",$5,$6}' ex.txt

input is

USERID:ORDER#:IP:PHONE:ADDRESS1:POSTCODE1
USERID:ORDER#:IP:PHONE:ADDRESS2:POSTCODE2

output is (on one line if I understand correctly)

ADDRESS1:POSTCODE1 ADDRESS2:POSTCODE2

only default is that it ends with a trailing space and does not end with a newline.

Which can be fixed with the slightly more complex (but still readable):

  awk -F: 'BEGIN {z=0;} {if (z==1) { printf " "; } ; z=1; printf "%s:%s",$5,$6} END{printf"\n"}' ex.txt

answered Aug 20 '16 at 14:06

Quick question, how do I specify which .txt file for the program to use.. or is ex.txt the input file & not the output? – wolf pkrs Aug 20 '16 at 14:16
`ex.txt` is the input. To redirect to a file just add `> out.txt` in the end. – Jean-François Fabre Aug 20 '16 at 14:18
error, gawk: 'BEGIN gawk: ^ invalid char ''' in expression – wolf pkrs Aug 20 '16 at 14:22
works fine here on MSYS or DOS CMD.exe. Have you tried both solutions? which one fails for you? I'm using GNU Awk 4.1.3. Can you type `gawk --version` and tell me the result. – Jean-François Fabre Aug 20 '16 at 14:31
I have 3.1.6 atm :/ – wolf pkrs Aug 20 '16 at 14:35
nothing fancy in my awk code. Are you running from a windows terminal? MSYS? Linux ? Can you upgrade? and tell us what the caret points to (`^`) in the above message (the line above we don't have). You can also put the expression between simple quotes in a file and use `-f` option instead of passing the whole command as a parameter. – Jean-François Fabre Aug 20 '16 at 14:43
im using a .bat filon windows, uhm i can't seem to find a version of 4.1.3 – wolf pkrs Aug 20 '16 at 14:58
Atandard advice in Windows is to put the awk script in a file and execute it as `awk -f script` to avoid Windows quoting hell. Better yet - install/use cygwin. – Ed Morton Aug 20 '16 at 17:44
Thank you everyone for the support, @Jean-FrançoisFabre your script works :) & Ed Morton thank you for cygwin, that was the solution i needed. – wolf pkrs Aug 20 '16 at 18:06

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 20 '16 at 14:28

0

This is a classic AWK transform. You want to use "-F :" to specify that the input is delimited by ":" and print a new ":" on output:

awk -F: '{ print $5 ":" $6 }' <input.txt >output.txt

answered Aug 20 '16 at 14:28

TomOnTime

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 21 '16 at 17:35

0

awk -F: 'NR==1 {print $5"1:"$6"1"};NR==2 {print $5"2:"$6"2"}' file
ADDRESS1:POSTCODE1
ADDRESS2:POSTCODE2

answered Aug 21 '16 at 17:35

Claes Wikner

3 Answers3