Re: The best way to convert space separated text to TSV?

[Peng Yu]

In wc output, the last column can have spaces. The total number of columns
must be specified to be sure which is the last column.

On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 3:11 AM Peter Brooks <address@hidden>
wrote:

> Unfortunately, that doesn't work for embedded spaces:
>
> echo '  a    "b b"  cc    dd' | gawk -v OFS='\t' '{ $1 = $1 ; print }' |
> od -c
> 0000000   a  \t   "   b  \t   b   "  \t   c   c  \t   d   d  \n
> 0000016
>
>
> On Tue, 11 Feb 2020 at 08:26, <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> $ echo '  a    bb  cc    dd' | gawk -v OFS='\t' '{ $1 = $1 ; print }' |
>> od -c
>> 0000000   a  \t   b   b  \t   c   c  \t   d   d  \n
>> 0000013
>>
>> Peng Yu <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > Many programs (such as wc and ps) print results in tables with one or
>> > more spaces as separators. But the last column allows spaces in them.
>> > To process the output of wc, I came up with the following code
>> > (sometimes I need to manually change the display name such as
>> > "file1"). But it is too verbose.
>> >
>> > BEGIN {
>> >       OFS = "\t"
>> >       for(i=1;i<ARGC;++i) {
>> >               fnames[i] = ARGV[i]
>> >       }
>> >       nfiles = ARGC - 1
>> >       delete ARGV
>> > }
>> > {
>> >       match($0, /^[ ]*/)
>> >       line = substr($0, RSTART+RLENGTH)
>> >       NF = 1
>> >       for(i=1; i<=n; ++i) {
>> >               if(match(line, /[ ]+/)) {
>> >                       $i = substr(line, 1, RSTART-1)
>> >                       line = substr(line, RSTART+RLENGTH)
>> >               }
>> >       }
>> >       if(NR <= nfiles) {
>> >               $i = fnames[NR]
>> >       } else {
>> >               if(line "") $i = line
>> >       }
>> >       print
>> > }
>> >
>> > $ awk -v n=2 -f ./wc.awk file1 <<EOF
>> >  a bb c
>> > aa  b c
>> > EOF
>> >
>> > $ awk -v n=3 -f ./wc.awk <<EOF
>> >  a bb c
>> > EOF
>> >
>> > What is the most succinct way to convert such kind of input to TSV
>> > format with gawk? Thanks.
>> >
>> > --
>> > Regards,
>> > Peng
>>
>>
>
> --
> Peter Brooks
>
> Skype:  Fustbariclation
> Twitter: Fustbariclation
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>
-- 
Regards,
Peng