formatting text

lonesoac0 · 05-20-2014, 09:36 PM

Hello all,

I was wondering if anyone knew how to format all of the different time formats that I have in a text file. I want all of the times imported in a MySQL table. As a result all of these different time formats need to be converted to the default TIME (HH:MM:SS) format in MySQL.

pan64 · 05-21-2014, 01:03 AM

first replace comma, dot is generally used.
next, you can parse easily hours and minutes
calculate seconds and round
format to HH:MM:SS

perl, awk or similar tools can do this task, but I think you can solve it using only bash builtins.

ondoho · 05-21-2014, 01:36 AM

do you need to do this only once or do you want to automate the process?

lonesoac0 · 05-21-2014, 07:42 AM

I would like to automate the process if I could.

pan64 · 05-21-2014, 07:44 AM

Why not? The steps are there, you need to choose your preferred language and implement... (and test)

ondoho · 05-21-2014, 01:19 PM

you have to build a parser that transforms the times, then go through the file line-by-line and write to a new file. the logic of the entries seems pretty stable, dots and commas are used only for breaking down minutes.
most probably someone has already implemented something like it as part of a bigger project, but my experience is that starting from scratch will be less time consuming than trying to adapt code from elsewhere...

people often seem to choose sed for tasks like this.

chrism01 · 05-22-2014, 07:21 AM

As above, pick a language start programming

Having had a quick look at the list, it's pretty irregular formats, so I'd use Perl: YMMV