Extracting Information from a Flat file

ryanlum · 11-06-2007, 12:43 AM

hey guyz,

I have this situation where.. i have a flat file. I will have to sum up only a certain field in the flat file.

Is there a way i can grep out the following format? Its a 1 line format.. but there are tons of lines.. so i would need to loop through all the lines

format:
1&1&1&1&1&3&1&1&1&1
1&2&2&2&2&3&2&1&1&1

I would like to grep out that particular section with the number 3 only in order to add it together.

Whats the best and easiest way to do this?

poet_imp · 11-06-2007, 01:00 AM

Most of the time I can figure out what is being asked. This time I am unable to. Can you try to explain again?

ryanlum · 11-06-2007, 01:05 AM

i have a file with the pattern above.
its seperated by & and i want to extract it from a specific column after the &

is that cleaR?

frenchn00b · 11-06-2007, 01:08 AM

( cool http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html )

ryanlum · 11-06-2007, 01:35 AM

I tried awk....
put for that format it doesn't do anything..

is there a way to count the number of & in the string, then take the next one?

ryanlum · 11-06-2007, 01:36 AM

becuase there are times when the format is like this

1&1&&2&

lakris · 11-06-2007, 02:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ryanlum

becuase there are times when the format is like this

1&1&&2&

Could this help? In bash...

lakris@Lakrix:~/Projects/scripts$ cat source.txt
1&1&1&1&1&3&1&1&1&1
1&2&2&2&2&3&2&1&1&1
1&2&7&2&2&3&2&1&1&1
1&2&2&2&2&3&2&1&1&1
1&2&9&2&2&3&2&1&1&1
1&2&&2&2&3&2&1&1&1

lakris@Lakrix:~/Projects/scripts$ val=0;sum=0;while read line;do val=`echo $line|cut -d"&" -f3`; [ x$val == x ] && val=0; sum=$(($sum+$val)); done < source.txt; echo $sum
21
lakris@Lakrix:~/Projects/scripts$

It reads the file, extracts the third &-separated field and accumulates it, and prints the sum.

/Lakris

carl0ski · 11-06-2007, 02:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ryanlum

hey guyz,

I have this situation where.. i have a flat file. I will have to sum up only a certain field in the flat file.

Is there a way i can grep out the following format? Its a 1 line format.. but there are tons of lines.. so i would need to loop through all the lines

format:
1&1&1&1&1&3&1&1&1&1
1&2&2&2&2&3&2&1&1&1

I would like to grep out that particular section with the number 3 only in order to add it together.

Whats the best and easiest way to do this?

i don't quite follow your question

an example of how the output should appear would be great
but this will count number of & in README.txt

grep -o '&' README.txt | wc -l | sed s/\ //g