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I have a file like this:
78@54@this@15@23
65@22@is@92@16
34@12@an@14@18
13@42@example@52@22
And I want to change it to this:
"78"@54@"this"@15@23
"65"@22@"is"@92@16
"34"@12@"an"@14@18
"13"@42@"example"@52@22
I've been struggling on this for a long time and I can't understand how to do it. Any help is appreciated, thank you.
You could try awk:
echo "78@54@this@15@23
65@22@is@92@16
34@12@an@14@18
13@42@example@52@22" |
awk -F@ '{print "\""$1"\"@"$2"@\""$3"\"@"$4"@"$5}'
"78"@54@"this"@15@23
"65"@22@"is"@92@16
"34"@12@"an"@14@18
"13"@42@"example"@52@22
'\' after the pipe | ... Actually, you can have whitespace and/or a comment after the |. You can even have multiple lines of comments between the | and the command.
– Peter.O
Mar 25 '12 at 14:33
A little more verbose, but I'd write this awk:
awk -F@ -v OFS=@ '
function quote(x) {return sprintf("\"%s\"", x)}
{print quote($1), $2, quote($3), $4}
'
I think an awk solution is probably better, but you can also use sed:
sed -r 's/(\d+)@(\d+)@(\w+)(.*)/"\1"@\2@"\3"\4/' /path/to/your/file
This is basically a mix of the two previous awk answers
`awk -F@ -vOFS=@ -vq='"' '{print q$1q, $2, q$3q, $4}`
In awk: add quotes around the first three fields, then print the line.
awk -F @ '{for (i = 1; i <= 3; i++) $i = "\"" $i "\""; print}'
-F @ sets the field separator to @. The loop adds quotes around the first three fields. The final print (short for print $0) prints the line with the modified fields; $0 is rebuilt whenever individual fields ($1, $2, …) are changed.
