Hi All,

I am new to scripting. I need your help to removing spaces from a string and assign them to different variables.

Iwant to call script with one command line argument which is file name which containes different attributes their type and different values eg

fdxE1ConfigAdminStatus int 1 2
fdxE1LineType int 1 2 3
.
.
.

Now I want script take one line every time from this file then in that line it will go till end and puts value in different attributes eg

attr1 = fdxE1ConfigAdminStatus
attr2 = int
attr3 = 1 and 2 [possibly an array]

then it goes to second line and do the same and so on

I wrote follwing program

if [ "$1" = "" ]; then
echo "$0 <attr filename >";
exit;
fi
while read line; do
status="";
echo $line;
done

First traversal of loop containes fdxE1ConfigAdminStatus int 1 2
Now I want to remove spaces after fdxE1ConfigAdminStatus, int, 1 and 2 and put them in different attributes.

This is bash script.

Could you all please help to me to find out a solution.

Thanks in advance

This is difficult to do in bash, that is getting it into variables that way. Maybe there's an alternate means to get to your end result, if you could explain where the data is eventually going to end up.

In most cases to process this type of input you'll need to read the data, parse it and save it to a temporary file... then do something with the temporary file.

If you can guarantee that the input data is a limited number of lines then reading it into arrays is possible, but this breaks down when the input file can be large without bounds.

if you know Python, you can do it easily

>>> example = "fdxE1ConfigAdminStatus int 1 2"
>>> split_example = example.split(" ",2)
>>> print split_example
['fdxE1ConfigAdminStatus', 'int', '1 2']
>>> attr1,attr2,attr3 = split_example
>>> print attr1
fdxE1ConfigAdminStatus
>>> print attr2
int
>>> print attr3
1 2
>>>

I think you can do it like this:

You should have the line containg your string in the variable $line but you already managed to do that.

You don't have to use and array, if you know the variable where you want to store something beforehand.

jlinkels

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" = "" ]; then
echo "$0 <attr filename >";
exit;
fi
echo "Method 1"
while read line; do
status=""
ARRAY=( ${line} )
#LEN=${#ARRAY[*]}
attr1=${ARRAY[0]}
attr2=${ARRAY[1]}
attr3=( ${ARRAY[@]:2} )
echo "attr1 = $attr1"
echo "attr2 = $attr2"
echo "attr3 = ${attr3[@]}"
done <file

#The second method
echo "Method 2"
while read attr1 attr2 attr3; do
status=""
echo "attr1 = $attr1"
echo "attr2 = $attr2"
echo "attr3 = $attr3"
done <file

You can also have it read into an array immediately:

Spirit receiver,

Script is running the way I want I just wanted to know the meaning of following line


for i in $(seq 2 $(( ${#ARRAY[*]} - 1)) )


Thanks in advance

and thanks to all other also who chip in to help

Spirit,

I know a little bit about bash programming, enough to write my scripts and give an advise to someone now and then.

But this statement:
makes me realize that I just started to learn.

This is the most obfuscated statement I ever saw. LOL!

jlinkels

for i in $(seq 2 $(( ${#ARRAY[*]} - 1)) )
${#ARRAY[*]} <- This gives you the number of elements in ARRAY.
$(( ${#ARRAY[*]} - 1)) ) <- This gives you the number of elements -1 (since array elements start at 0.)
So ${ARRAY[2]} would be element #3.
So the for loop is count from array element #3 to the last element.

This whole section:
for i in $(seq 2 $(( ${#ARRAY[*]} - 1)) )
do
echo -n "'${ARRAY[$i]}' "
done

Can be replaced by one line:
echo "${ARRAY[@]:2}"
Which means everything from the 3rd (remember arrays are 0 based) element to the last.

I also realized that it looks a little intricate, but that's what I came up with immediately from what I wanted at that point:
The 'values' are stored separately in the components of ARRAY, beginning wih ARRAY[2]. So, to put each value in quotes and print it, I need to loop over the indices of ARRAY, beginning with 2.
That's essentially what
would do. Unfortunately, ${#ARRAY[*]} doesn't give the final index but the total number of values, so that loop would end up printing an additional ''. We need to make one iteration less, and $(( ${#ARRAY[*]} - 1 )) subtracts 1 from the value of ${#ARRAY[*]} . It's as simple as that. One could have used some temporary variables to make it more readable instead of putting everything into a single line, but I'd consider that as obfuscation.
After all, the only point of my previous post was to mention the -a switch of read.

Edit: Ouch, this time I was really slow.

Thanks .bin/bash and spirit

Is it possible to check in the for loop that i will always be more than 2 then only go into for loop otherwise not.

Because what is happening is - when array is of size 2
the for loop is trying to execute for i == 2 nd i == 1
What I want is loop shud execute for values which are more than two.

Thanks in advance

I don't see your problem, the for loop is not executed if the array contains less than three elements. But of course you can add a test like this:
I think you should go through one of the Bash scripting guides like this: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

This would also work:
[ -z ${ARRAY[@]:2} ]

Is this what the OP wanted?
?

Yeah thats also in post #5 above. Method #2