Help with using sed, awk, nawk or tr

[ray.wurlod]

Erk, I didn't mean to start a flame war! Hopefully the explanation of the script will help anyone new to the stream editor (sed) to understand how it's controlled.

[djm]

Hence why, on reflection, I had offered the more robust alternative, (sed 's/^\[[0-9]\{1,\},[0-9]\{1,\}\]//g' 's/\(|\)\[[0-9]\{1,\},[0-9]\{1,\}\]/\1/g'), which deals with the coordinates at the start of the line explicitly and replaced "zero or more" instances of | with exactly one instance. (And yup the "\(\) & \1" portion is no longer necessary but I left it in so less of the suggestion had to be altered). I don't have a UNIX session to try it at the moment but if someone else has and cares to post whether it correctly renders the data example provided by Jim, I'd appreciate it.

(Far from a flame war Ray - I welcome constructive alternatives/improvements to postings).

David

[kduke]

This is exactly why I hate sed, awk and Perl. It is almost unreadable. They are powerful but impossible to maintain. Assembler is great for the same reasons.

[jzparad]

Much better David!

Code: Select all

$ echo "[1,0]3009|[1,1]502" | sed -e 's/^\[[0-9]\{1,\},[0-9]\{1,\}\]//g' -e 's/\(|\)\[[0-9]\{1,\},[0-9]\{1,\}\]/\1/g'
3009|502
$ echo "[1,0]3009|[1,1][1,2]" | sed -e 's/^\[[0-9]\{1,\},[0-9]\{1,\}\]//g' -e 's/\(|\)\[[0-9]\{1,\},[0-9]\{1,\}\]/\1/g'
3009|[1,2]

[djm]

Thanks for checking it out Jim. I only get to feed my UNIX addiction Monday through Friday!

David

[jzparad]

Have a look at SFU from microsoft. It gives you a good UNIX shell for Windows and its free.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsservers ... fault.mspx

[ArndW]

Jim,

that was an interesting link! I've become so used to using MKS toolkit that I never even looked at the market to see if there was any competition. If you or anyone else here has used both could you make a comparison?

[jzparad]

I've never used MKS - only cygwin. From the documentation of SFU, it seems to be designed more for enterprise integration whereas cygwin simply provides a unix shell along with all the familiar UNIX tools. I've only just started using SFU and, so far so good.