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ATTENTION! I have changed the RegEx and sample data so some answers could be wrong! I apologize if doing this is bad practice.

I used grep (online tool) to extract a list of data where repeated parts are sometimes substituted with hyphens (-o flag). The numbers are always 8 digits. There may be more 8-digit numbers following these RegEx used was: [0-9]{8}(, -[0-9]*)*(, [0-9]{8})* Sample data below:

33520470
33520850, -60, -70, -80, -90, 33630077
25453810
13815206, -07, -08, 60682651, 60709994
13340820
61040146, -55
60819060, -79
60819088

And my desired output would be:

33520470
33520850
33520860
33520870
33520880
33520890
33630077
25453810
13815206
13815207
13815208
60682651
60709994
13340820
61040146
61040155
60819060
60819079
60819088

Could this be done with grep? If not, could you suggest any unix or other tools to achieve this result? I was thinking sed or awk.

EDIT: This has been solved. I will include the correct command here just for convenience to skip having to dig through the comments:

-F ', ' '{ print $1; for(a=2;a <= NF; a ++){ if(length($a) <= 7){ printf("%s%s\n",substr($1,1,length($1)-(length($a)-1)),substr($a, 2))} else { print $a } } }'

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  • You can't use grep for that. awk will work, but you will need a small program to do it. – RalfFriedl Feb 4 '19 at 7:06
  • Are the hyphened parts always exactly two digits? – Sparhawk Feb 4 '19 at 7:19
  • There may be up to 7, the hyphen substitutes the repeating parts of the numbers. It would be safer to cover all possible occurrences. – Sigmund Freud Feb 4 '19 at 7:28
  • I am not sure about the version, I am using the website online-utility.org/text/grep.jsp – Sigmund Freud Feb 4 '19 at 7:40
  • This can still be done with grep, but with the new conditions it is definitely better handled by awk and sed. – WAF Feb 4 '19 at 9:50
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I tried it with awk:

cat file | awk -F ', ' '{ print $1; for(a=2;a <= NF; a ++){printf("%s%s\n",substr($1,1,length($1)-(length($a)-1)),substr($a, 2)) } }'

Output:

33520470
33520850
33520860
33520870
33520880
33520890
25453810
13340820
61040146
61040155
60819060
60819079
60819088

Edit:

Code to get correct result:

cat file | awk -F ', ' '{ print $1; for(a=2;a <= NF; a ++){ if(length($a) <= 3){ printf("%s%s\n",substr($1,1,length($1)-(length($a)-1)),substr($a, 2))} else { print $a } } }'

Result:

33520470
33520850
33520860
33520870
33520880
33520890
33630077
25453810
13815206
13815207
13815208
60682651
60709994
13340820
61040146
61040155
60819060
60819079
60819088
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20
  • This works well. Does awk support RegEx? Could it be tweaked further to include what grep does in the first example? Currently I have to use grep and then your solution on grep's output. – Sigmund Freud Feb 4 '19 at 7:46
  • @SigmundFreud Yes, awk supports regex: tutorialspoint.com/awk/awk_regular_expressions.htm but I think that using multiple commands to get result is not bad solution. – Matej Feb 4 '19 at 7:49
  • I discovered that I had an error in my RegEx. The new one is [0-9]{8}(, -[0-9]*)*(, [0-9]{8})* and returns rows with more 8-digit numbers such as 13815206, -07, -08, 60682651, 60709994 which does not work with that command. The solution worked perfectly with the previously provided data set, however! – Sigmund Freud Feb 4 '19 at 8:58
  • @SigmundFreud The difference is in these numbers? -07 -08 – Matej Feb 4 '19 at 9:03
  • 1
    You did it! It works perfectly now. – Sigmund Freud Feb 4 '19 at 11:42
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Updated with a pre-processing step to handle the modified input.

The rest of this answer assumes that the data has been pre-processed with

grep -oE '[0-9]{8}(, -[0-9]+)*'

I.e., the full solution would require

grep -oE ... file | awk ...

BEGIN { FS = ", *" }

{
    print $1
    for (i = 2; i <= NF; ++i)
        print substr($1, 1, length($1) - length($i) + 1) substr($i, 2)
}

This awk script reads a line and then prints the first comma-delimited field. It then loops over the remaining fields and outputs the first field with enough characters cut off at the end to insert the characters after the - in the other fields.

The code allows for "suffixes" of variable length.

Testing:

$ awk -f script.awk file
33520470
33520850
33520860
33520870
33520880
33520890
25453810
13340820
61040146
61040155
60819060
60819079
60819088

Another example:

$ cat file
1111
2222,-3,-4, -33,-44, -333,-444

$ awk -f script.awk file
1111
2222
2223
2224
2233
2244
2333
2444

As a "one-liner":

awk -F ', *' '{print $1; for(i=2;i<=NF;++i)print substr($1,1,length($1)-length($i)+1)substr($i,2)}' file
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