3

I have a file of the format, with a leading space before each line:

 "Western Overseas",
 "Western Overseas",
 "^",
 "--",
 "^",
 "--",
 "--",
 null,
 24995,
 9977,
 "CR",

 "Western Refrigeration Private Limited",
 "Western Refrigeration Private Limited",
 "[ICRA]A",
 "--",
 "[ICRA]A1",
 "--",
 "Stable",
 null,
 14951,
 2346,
 "CR",

I would like to convert it to a CSV file with format:

 "Western Overseas","Western Overseas","^","--","^","--","--",null,24995,9977,"CR"
 "Western Refrigeration Private Limited","Western Refrigeration Private Limited","[ICRA]A","--","[ICRA]A1","--","Stable",null,14951,2346,"CR"

I'm trying to use tr but am having trouble since it either prints all output to one line and seems to replace newlines with a double newline. Any help is appreciated.

5
  • 1
    (1) Edited to reflect two lines instead of 3. (4) There are no leading spaces on the empty line, only at the beginning of lines with actual text.
    – user362513
    Jul 16, 2019 at 7:47
  • 1
    No space. I.e. foo,bar is required for the output.
    – user362513
    Jul 16, 2019 at 7:52
  • 1
    Please provide the first few lines of a hexdump from the actual file. Something like xxd test.txt | head -n 12.
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Jul 16, 2019 at 8:41
  • 1
    00000000: 2022 5765 7374 6572 6e20 4f76 6572 7365 "Western Overse 00000010: 6173 222c 0a20 2257 6573 7465 726e 204f as",. "Western O 00000020: 7665 7273 6561 7322 2c0a 2022 5e22 2c0a verseas",. "^",.
    – user362513
    Jul 16, 2019 at 8:48
  • 1
    awk '$1=$1' RS=',\n\n' infile if you don't mind last comma for last line.
    – αғsнιη
    Jul 16, 2019 at 13:17

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
5

An awk solution is

awk '{if(NF){gsub(/^ |,$/,""); printf c $0; c=","}else{printf "\n"; c=""}};END{printf "\n"}'

expanded with comments:

{
    if(NF) { # if the line isn't empty
        gsub(/^ |,$/,""); # remove the first space and last comma
        printf c $0; # print the line (without a newline)
        c="," # set c to add a comma for the next field
    } else {
        printf "\n"; # empty line, output a newline
        c="" # don't print a comma for the next entry
    }
};
END {
    printf "\n" # finish off with a newline
}
1 
<file sed '
   :start
   s/\n$//
   t
   s/\n //
   N
   b start
  ' | sed 's/,$//'

The first sed loops (:start, b start) and appends lines to its pattern space (N) until a newline at the very end is found and deleted (s/\n$//). This indicates an empty line was read, the tool exits the loop then (t). At each iteration any surviving newline (and a consecutive space) is removed anyway to concatenate lines (s/\n //).

The second sed removes trailing commas.

8
  • This returns the same output as my input, without any commas.
    – user362513
    Jul 16, 2019 at 8:09
  • I used <test.txt where that is the file in question, and made no other changes to your command.
    – user362513
    Jul 16, 2019 at 8:29
  • I'm currently on MacOS, not quite sure what the sed differences might be between us. I repeated the test by copying the text as you did and have the same result.
    – user362513
    Jul 16, 2019 at 8:47
  • @user362513 My sed is GNU sed, I guess yours is not. Please try the current version of my code. Any difference?
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Jul 16, 2019 at 9:10
  • There appears to be a '^M' carriage return in my actual file. Do you have any idea how to get around that?
    – user362513
    Jul 16, 2019 at 9:54

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