CODEWITHSUNDEEP
csvtextawk
NinjaGaiden
NinjaGaiden

Reputation: 3146

partition text with no fixed width

I have some text like this

blue chile               green   morning dawn
red  turkey              pink    morning dawn
white south africa       red     evening midst & more

I would like to split it like this (notice the pipe delimiter)

blue child | green morning dawn
red turkey | pink morning dawn
white south africa | red evening midst & more

There aren't fixed width so I am having trouble partitioning the text

Upvotes: 0

Views: 36

Answers (2)

karakfa
karakfa

Reputation: 67507

if you want to normalize spaces in addition to the pipe delimiter

$ sed -r 's/(.{25})/\1 | /' file | tr -s ' '

blue chile | green morning dawn
red turkey | pink morning dawn
white south africa | red evening midst & more

this matches your output but note that the extra space in red turkey is removed as well. If you want to preserve it, it will require extra steps.

Upvotes: 1

Ed Morton
Ed Morton

Reputation: 204064

This MIGHT be what you're looking for:

$ sed -E 's/ {3,}/ | /; s/  */ /g' file
blue chile | green morning dawn
red turkey | pink morning dawn
white south africa | red evening midst & more

The above assumes your 2 "fields" are separated by 3 or more blank chars as in your posted sample input. It will work in GNU or OSX sed for -E to enable EREs.

Otherwise, if the fields really ARE fixed width as it appears in your posted input then for improved robustness consider using GNU awk for FIELDWIDTHS:

$ awk -v FIELDWIDTHS='25 8 999' -v OFS=' | ' '{print $1, $2, $3}' file
blue chile                | green    | morning dawn
red  turkey               | pink     | morning dawn
white south africa        | red      | evening midst & more

$ awk -v FIELDWIDTHS='25 8 999' -v OFS=' | ' '{print $1, $2 $3}' file
blue chile                | green   morning dawn
red  turkey               | pink    morning dawn
white south africa        | red     evening midst & more

$ awk -v FIELDWIDTHS='25 8 999' -v OFS=' | ' '{$0 = $1 OFS $2 $3; gsub(/ +/," ")} 1' file
blue chile | green morning dawn
red turkey | pink morning dawn
white south africa | red evening midst & more

Upvotes: 3

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