How to split text between separator into multiple files?

Question

I have a text file contaning the following:

"random
textA"
"random
random
textB"

The separator is "

How can I split the containt into multiple file as follow using a bash command?

File 1 :

random
textA

File 2 :

random
random
textB

I came into examples using csplit or awk but they does not cover this text layout.

Answer 1

Simple awk command:

awk 'NR%2==0{ print >("File " ++i) }' RS='"' infile

RS defines " as record separator and NR is the record number. If the record number was modulo of 2 (because we have another first " for records), then print the current record $0 into a File #.

Answer 2

If the opening quote is always at the beginning of the line, csplit will work just fine like this:

bash$ csplit /tmp/data '/^"/'

That produces files called xx00, etc. Note, your example removes the quotation marks and this doesn't. You'd need a command line sed to do that:

bash$ for file in xx* ; do { sed 's/^"//;s/"$//;' ${file} >x${file}; } ; done

Answer 3

With GNU awk

awk -v RS='"[[:space:]]*"' '
{sub(/^"|"[[:space:]]*$/, "");print > "output." ++n; close("output." n)}' file.txt

Answer 4

You can do:

awk -v RS=\" -v ORS= \
  '{ sub(/^\n*/,"");sub(/\n*$/,""); };
  /^\n*$/ { next;};
  { if(strcnt==0) { print $0 >"file1"; strcnt++;} else
  { print $0 >"file2"; }; }' file