awk or sed programming question

starplex · 07-11-2008, 10:36 AM

I have a word list in which every word is on a new line. I need to add text to it. a little example of what i want to do.
Word List:

apple
computer
beer

Text to be inserted for each word:

Code:

<pardef n="THE WORD__n">
      <e>
        <p>
          <l/>
          <r><s n="noun"/><s n="singular"/></r>
        </p>
      </e>
      <e>
        <p>
          <l>s</l>
          <r><s n="noun"/><s n="plural"/></r>
        </p>
      </e>
    </pardef>

How do I do this in sed or awk. It seems to me like every line/word needs to be turned into a variable and than use a for loop or something.

Thank you in advance.

colucix · 07-11-2008, 10:49 AM

Using awk you don't need a loop, since awk parses a text file line by line. You simply have to give your world list as argument to awk and write the proper print statements, inserting $0 in place of THE WORD. Otherwise you can do a simple shell script which reads the world list and echoes the proper lines, like:

Code:

while read word
do
  echo "<pardef n=\"${word}__n\">"   >> output_file
  echo "      <e>"                   >> output_file
  ....
done < <(cat world_list)

just escaping the literal double quotes, and eventually other special characters. Or you can create a little text file as a template, containing the lines you want to insert and a pattern to be substituted by sed, for example THE_WORD. Then again in a loop:

Code:

while read word
do
  sed s/THE_WORD/$word/g template_file   >> output_file
done < <(cat world_list)

starplex · 07-11-2008, 11:24 AM

Than you very much. I owe you a beer.