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Old 06-14-2010, 12:16 PM   #1
cliffyao
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Registered: Oct 2009
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How to separate lowercase and uppercase in my file


Hi, All

I have a file partially like this

209 c 89
215 a 76
603 B 190
626 f 240

I want to separate this file into two sub-files based on the lowercase and uppercase of column 2 so that the sub-files are like

file1

209 c 89
215 a 76
626 f 240

file2

603 B 190

Can anyone help me how to do that?

Thanks very much
 
Old 06-14-2010, 01:00 PM   #2
Tinkster
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Code:
awk '{if($2 ~ /[a-z]/){print $0 > FILENAME"_l" }else{print $0 > FILENAME"_u"}}' file


Cheers,
Tink
 
Old 06-14-2010, 02:06 PM   #3
cliffyao
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Registered: Oct 2009
Posts: 27

Original Poster
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Hi, Tink

Thanks for your quick response. I slightly modified your command to

awk '$2 ~ /[a-z]/' input.txt > output.txt

And the output.txt is the same as the input.txt..

I understood that you were using regular expression so I googled and changed the command again to

awk '$2 ~ /[[:lower:]]/' input.txt > output_lower.txt
awk '$2 ~ /[[:upper:]]/' input.txt > output_upper.txt

And now, it works.

Although I got what I wanted now, I am still curious why [a-z] can't work in my case.

Also, I noticed that I had to use double-quoted [[:lower:]] to make it work. I am wondering why single quote can't work. I searched regular expression online and it looks like

[:upper:] Any alpha character A to Z.
[:lower:] Any alpha character a to z.

Thanks again!
 
Old 06-14-2010, 02:20 PM   #4
Tinkster
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cliffyao View Post
Hi, Tink

Thanks for your quick response. I slightly modified your command to

awk '$2 ~ /[a-z]/' input.txt > output.txt

And the output.txt is the same as the input.txt..

I understood that you were using regular expression so I googled and changed the command again to

awk '$2 ~ /[[:lower:]]/' input.txt > output_lower.txt
awk '$2 ~ /[[:upper:]]/' input.txt > output_upper.txt

And now, it works.

Although I got what I wanted now, I am still curious why [a-z] can't work in my case.

Also, I noticed that I had to use double-quoted [[:lower:]] to make it work. I am wondering why single quote can't work. I searched regular expression online and it looks like

[:upper:] Any alpha character A to Z.
[:lower:] Any alpha character a to z.

Thanks again!
Why a-z didn't work for you I can't answer, maybe an
encoding thing? As for the [[ ... that's a requirement.
[:lower:] is the equivalent of a-z on ASCII or iso8859-1
system - note that a-z there doesn't have the [] around
it; hence you still need the outer square bracket to make
it a range.



Cheers,
Tink
 
Old 06-14-2010, 08:20 PM   #5
grail
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Well assuming the input only ever has alpha in column 2 you could just go with checking the whole line, so something like this can work;
Code:
awk '/[[:lower:]]/{print > "lower";next}1' input > upper
 
  


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