Text Manipulation Across multiple lines

Question

I Have a file that has text like this:

AAAA
BBBB
CCCC
DDDD

1234
5678
9012
3456

EEEE 

7890

etc...

And i want to match up the Alphabetic lines with the Numeric lines so they are like this:

AAAA 1234 
BBBB 5678
CCCC 9012
DDDD 3456

EEEE 7890

Does anyone know of a simple way to achieve this?

Answer 1

One way using perl:

Content of script.pl:

use warnings;
use strict;

## Check arguments.
die qq[Usage: perl $0 <input-file>\n] unless @ARGV == 1;

my (@alpha, @digit);

while ( <> ) {
        ## Omit blank lines.
        next if m/\A\s*\Z/;

        ## Remove leading and trailing spaces.
        s/\A\s*//;
        s/\s*\Z//;

        ## Save alphanumeric fields and fields with
        ## only digits to different arrays.
        if ( m/\A[[:alpha:]]+\Z/ ) {
                push @alpha, $_;
        }
        elsif ( m/\A[[:digit:]]+\Z/ ) {
                push @digit, $_;
        }
}

## Get same positions from both arrays and print them
## in the same line.
for my $i ( 0 .. $#alpha ) {
        printf qq[%s %s\n], $alpha[ $i ], $digit[ $i ];
}

Content of infile:

AAAA
BBBB
CCCC
DDDD

1234
5678
9012
3456

EEEE 

7890

Run it like:

perl script.pl infile

And result:

AAAA 1234
BBBB 5678
CCCC 9012
DDDD 3456
EEEE 7890

Answer 2

In awk, preserving empty lines, assuming the file is well formatted, but logic could be added to check the file:

awk -v RS="" '{for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) a[i]=$i
  getline
  for(i=1; i<=NF; i++) print a[i] " " $i
  print ""}' file

Answer 3

<input sed -nr '/^[A-Z]{4}$/,/^$/w out1
                /^[0-9]{4}$/,/^$/w out2'
paste -d' ' out1 out2 |sed 's/^ $//' 

or, in a single step, without temp files

paste -d' ' <(sed -nr '/^[A-Z]{4}$/,/^$/p' input) \
            <(sed -nr '/^[0-9]{4}$/,/^$/p' input) | sed 's/^ $//' 

The last sed step removes the delimiter on the blank lines, which is introduced by paste...

Answer 4

With emacs use rectangle operations to cut the text lines and paste them before the numerical lines.

Answer 5

If the entries are in order,

1. Split the input into alphabetic entries and numeric entries, using grep:

   • grep "[[:alpha:]]\+" < file > alpha
   • grep "[[:digit:]]\+" < file > digit

2. Join the two resulting files, alpha and digit, using paste:

   • paste alpha digit (you can add -d " " so it uses a space instead of a tab)

Answer 6

Too bad awk doesn't have nice push/pop/unshift/shift functions. Here's a short Perl snippet

perl -M5.010 -lne '
  given ($_) {
    when (/^[[:alpha:]]+$/) {push @alpha, $_}
    when (/^\d+$/) {say shift(@alpha), " ", $_}
    default {say}
  }
'