Concatinate a list of text into comma separated group of 6

Question

I have a file test.txt which has huge entry a sample of which is below.

Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Andorra
Angola
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Australia
Austria
Azerbaijan
The Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belgium
Belize
Benin
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Brazil
Brunei
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cabo Verde
Cambodia
Cameroon
Canada
Central African Republic
Chad
Chile
China
Colombia
Comoros

I can use cat test.txt | tr '\n' ',' to convert the new line into a comma-separated list.

However, I want the command separate list as a group of 6 each like below.

Afghanistan,Albania,Algeria,Andorra,Angola,Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina,Armenia,Australia,Austria,Azerbaijan,The Bahamas
Bahrain,Bangladesh,Barbados,Belarus,Belgium,Belize
and so on ...

How could I do this in Centos bash shell?

Answer 1

mapfile -t data < test.txt;
printf '%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s\n' "${data[@]}";

if offset is bigger and need a feasible solution use awk , else if you want pure shell you may need some looping !

f () { 
    offset=$1;
    infile="$2";
    mapfile -t data < "$infile";
    while ((${#data[@]}));do
        line="$(printf '%s,' "${data[@]:0:offset}")";
        data=("${data[@]:offset}");
        echo "${line%,*}";
    done
}
f 5 test.txt

Answer 2

For an arbitrary number of columns:

awk -v col=6 '{printf "%s%s", (NR>1) ? (NR-1) % col ? "," : RS : "", $0}
              END{if (NR) print ""}' < your-file

With pr (assuming the input like in your sample doesn't contain one of the special sequences recognised by some pr implementations; with the GNU one (as found on CEntOS), that includes at least the form-feed character):

pr -t -a -s, -6 < your-file

With GNU pr, you'll find you can't get more than 36 columns (half of 72, the default page width), unless you also use -w (or non-standard -W), but then you get some truncation / padding. You can work around that with -J (also a GNU extension), but who knows what other side effect that entails.

For 45 columns with GNU pr:

pr -Jtas, -w90 -45

(YMMV with other pr implementations, I find the pr command to be quite a jolly mess).

Answer 3

$ paste -d, - - - - - - <file
Afghanistan,Albania,Algeria,Andorra,Angola,Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina,Armenia,Australia,Austria,Azerbaijan,The Bahamas
Bahrain,Bangladesh,Barbados,Belarus,Belgium,Belize
Benin,Bhutan,Bolivia,Bosnia and Herzegovina,Botswana,Brazil
Brunei,Bulgaria,Burkina Faso,Burundi,Cabo Verde,Cambodia
Cameroon,Canada,Central African Republic,Chad,Chile,China
Colombia,Comoros,,,,

The paste command is here used to create output that is comma-delimited in six columns.

There is not enough data in the sample to fill the last few columns on the last line, so these are empty. If you want to delete these, then pipe the result through sed '$s/,*$//' which deletes all trailing commas on the last line:

$ paste -d, - - - - - - <file | sed '$s/,*$//'
Afghanistan,Albania,Algeria,Andorra,Angola,Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina,Armenia,Australia,Austria,Azerbaijan,The Bahamas
Bahrain,Bangladesh,Barbados,Belarus,Belgium,Belize
Benin,Bhutan,Bolivia,Bosnia and Herzegovina,Botswana,Brazil
Brunei,Bulgaria,Burkina Faso,Burundi,Cabo Verde,Cambodia
Cameroon,Canada,Central African Republic,Chad,Chile,China
Colombia,Comoros

Answer 4

awk can be used:

$ awk 'BEGIN{i=1;} { a[i]=a[i]","$0;if(NR%6==0){sub(",","",a[i]);print a[i];i++;} } END {if(a[i]){sub(",","",a[i]);print a[i]}}' file
Afghanistan,Albania,Algeria,Andorra,Angola,Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina,Armenia,Australia,Austria,Azerbaijan,The Bahamas
Bahrain,Bangladesh,Barbados,Belarus,Belgium,Belize
Benin,Bhutan,Bolivia,Bosnia and Herzegovina,Botswana,Brazil
Brunei,Bulgaria,Burkina Faso,Burundi,Cabo Verde,Cambodia
Cameroon,Canada,Central African Republic,Chad,Chile,China
Colombia,Comoros

OR Using perl one-liner :

perl -a -F'\n' -00 -ne ' map { (($_ + 1)%6 == 0) ? print $F[$_]."\n" : print $F[$_].",";  } ( 0 .. @F-1); print "\n" if eof' file