Re: The best way to convert space separated text to TSV?

[Peter Brooks]

Unfortunately, that doesn't work for embedded spaces:

echo '  a    "b b"  cc    dd' | gawk -v OFS='\t' '{ $1 = $1 ; print }' | od
-c
0000000   a  \t   "   b  \t   b   "  \t   c   c  \t   d   d  \n
0000016


On Tue, 11 Feb 2020 at 08:26, <address@hidden> wrote:

> $ echo '  a    bb  cc    dd' | gawk -v OFS='\t' '{ $1 = $1 ; print }' | od
> -c
> 0000000   a  \t   b   b  \t   c   c  \t   d   d  \n
> 0000013
>
> Peng Yu <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Many programs (such as wc and ps) print results in tables with one or
> > more spaces as separators. But the last column allows spaces in them.
> > To process the output of wc, I came up with the following code
> > (sometimes I need to manually change the display name such as
> > "file1"). But it is too verbose.
> >
> > BEGIN {
> >       OFS = "\t"
> >       for(i=1;i<ARGC;++i) {
> >               fnames[i] = ARGV[i]
> >       }
> >       nfiles = ARGC - 1
> >       delete ARGV
> > }
> > {
> >       match($0, /^[ ]*/)
> >       line = substr($0, RSTART+RLENGTH)
> >       NF = 1
> >       for(i=1; i<=n; ++i) {
> >               if(match(line, /[ ]+/)) {
> >                       $i = substr(line, 1, RSTART-1)
> >                       line = substr(line, RSTART+RLENGTH)
> >               }
> >       }
> >       if(NR <= nfiles) {
> >               $i = fnames[NR]
> >       } else {
> >               if(line "") $i = line
> >       }
> >       print
> > }
> >
> > $ awk -v n=2 -f ./wc.awk file1 <<EOF
> >  a bb c
> > aa  b c
> > EOF
> >
> > $ awk -v n=3 -f ./wc.awk <<EOF
> >  a bb c
> > EOF
> >
> > What is the most succinct way to convert such kind of input to TSV
> > format with gawk? Thanks.
> >
> > --
> > Regards,
> > Peng
>
>

-- 
Peter Brooks

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