Hi guys,

I'm having problem's with the output of awk I have a few things to say first ill show the database file layout

FILE :

#Groupname; Lastname, Firstname
*******************************
amotet; Tetzlaff, Nicholas
lavlym; Lavallie, Stacey Anne
lawzuz; Zuzarte, Mark W
lawzuz; Lawrence Leger, Daniel Thomas
leusom; Somji, Rahim
leusom; Leung, Hoi-yung Gary
lavlym; Lymberis, Andrew John

NEEDED OUTPUT:

Team Member ---------------------------------------- Group Name
=========================================
Stacey Anne Lavallie -------------------------------------lavlym
Andrew John Lymberis-----------------------------------lavlym

-- suppose to be white space

I have the user input the groupname they would like to see the members for this i just input the string manually

I'm having Problems with the spacing

sed 's/,/;/g' teamlist.dat > test
awk 'FS=";" {if ($1 ~/lavlym/ && NR > 2) print $3, $2, $1}' test
outputs this

Team Member ---------------------------------------- Group Name
=========================================
Stacey Lavallie lavlym
Andrew Lymberis lavlym

it chops off there middle name but is I only display $3 it show first and middle like its suppose to

If anyone can point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it
Thanks

Jamie

Would something like this work for you?

awk '/lavlym/ { print $3, $2, ": ", $1}' teamlist.dat \
| sed -e 's/, //' -e 's/;//'
Stacey Lavallie: lavlym
Andrew Lymberis: lavlym

Thanks for the input but that still cuts on there second part of there first name

awk ' { print $3, $4, $2, ": ", $1}' teamlist.dat | sed -e 's/, //' -e 's/;//'
Firstname Lastname: #Groupname
: *******************************
Nicholas Tetzlaff: amotet
Stacey Anne Lavallie: lavlym
Mark W Zuzarte: lawzuz
LegerDaniel Lawrence : lawzuz
Rahim Somji: leusom
Hoi-yung Gary Leung: leusom
Andrew John Lymberis: lavlym

That works for most case but I forgot to show that some people have double first names and double last name so default FS wont work

I have splite fine I need to format it now
it is odd

awk -v y=$temp 'FS=";" {if ($1 ~y && NR > 2) printf "%s%s%35s\n", $3, $2, $1 }' test

if I do that It only shows the first 8 chars of $3 and if I put any spaces after like this

awk -v y=$temp 'FS=";" {if ($1 ~y && NR > 2) printf "%s %s%35s\n", $3, $2, $1 }' test

it prints infront of $3 im confused by this buy any other space after %35s it goes after $2 so I dont know why this is happerning

Hi -

1. As you're quickly discovering, tools like "awk" and "sed" work best when
your data format is simple; they become much more difficult when there are
a lot of "exceptions to the rule".

If you don't have a really, really simple data format, you're often much better
off writing in some other tool (Perl, for example, or C). Please consider if this
project might be better done in Perl than in "awk".

2. Having said that, the key to solving this problem in "awk" is to "simplify" the
format. We have three fields ("group", "last name" and "first name"). If we
reduce things to just one delimiter, then it doesn't matter whether a "last name"
has one, two, three or more words - it all becomes a single field.

For example:
sed 's/;/,/' teamlist.dat \
| awk -F',' '{ printf "%s%s %-10s\n", $3, $2, $1 }' # Parse/format the line

'Hope that helps .. PSM

Thanks, that helps better, I would use something different but it is a school assignment for shell scripting course, which we use bash mostly so kinda stuck with what I have thanks for all your input though



Jamie