Re: Need help for import of text file

[Steve Clark <sclark@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/16/2012 01:12 PM, Peter Bex wrote:

On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 06:48:35PM +0100, Andreas wrote:

With sed as startingpoint I figured it out.
Those 3 steps make the input files consumable for COPY

1. dos2unix
2. sed -i 's/[ \t]*$//'
3. sed -i 's/  / /g'

You can reduce this to one invocation by separating the commands
by a semicolon (or by passing multiple -e flags)

sed -i 's/[ \t]*$//;s/  / /g'

The input files get created by a simple windows batch where I can't 
change anything.
It uses echo to attach a line of 4 parameters to those textfiles.

How would you manage if one or more of those parameters contained blanks 
in some cases?
This doesn't appear, yet. But I consider this as luck.   :}

The real column formats are ( TEXT, TEXT, DATE, TIME ).

Well, that's a bit trickier and my sed skills are rather rusty.
I'd probably use awk for these more complex tasks:

awk '/\(.*\)/ { gsub(/ +/, " "); } { print $0 }'

The "gsub" command acts like sed's "s" command with the "g" modifier.
By prefixing the block with the gsub command with a regex, it only
acts on that regex.  The regex in this example only looks for an opening
and a closing paren anywhere on the line; you might need to tweak it
to more closely match your case.  Alternatively, you could implement
a counter that skips the four lines (which can be done with both sed
and awk).

If it gets more complex than this, you can always write a proper
program in a "real" language to do it.  This can be easier to maintain.

Cheers,
Peter

why not use the squeeze option of tr.

tr -s " "

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Stephen Clark
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