CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexcsplit
Ed Siefker
Ed Siefker

Reputation: 85

How to csplit on tabs?

I have a tab delimited file with chunks of data separated by lines of empty fields. It looks like this:

#comment\n
data<TAB>data<TAB>data\n
data<TAB>data<TAB>data\n
<TAB><TAB>\n
#comment\n
#comment 2\n
data<TAB>data<TAB>data\n
data<TAB>data<TAB>data\n
data<TAB>data<TAB>data\n
<TAB><TAB>\n
data<TAB><TAB>\n

I'm trying to use csplit to split this file into chunks. It's only creating two files, when there are 23 matches to my pattern:

$ grep '^       *$' file.txt  | wc -l
23

$ csplit file.txt '/^   *$/'
875
587453

$ ls
file.txt  xx00  xx01

I'm using CTRL-V to enter the tab, '\t' doesn't work for either csplit or grep. The environment is Bash on Cygwin. I've examined the file with a hex editor, and it's definitely using UNIX line feeds.

What could I be doing wrong?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 121

Answers (1)

Ed Siefker
Ed Siefker

Reputation: 85

You have to append '{*}' to the end to get it to break more than once. Who knew?

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions