Hi guys,
I'm having a slight dilemma on reading data from a text file and outputting it into a table then displaying it. Basically I'm writing a shell script that takes information from text files then outputs the data into a table with 4 headings. The extracting of the data is fine, but creating a table i'm having problems with. I think it is possible to do it using the awk function, but so far i'm having a lot of difficulties. Any help would be great. Thanks for your time

What DB are you using?
Are you going to create table every time?
What are the contents of the data file you are using ?

What do the text files look like? What do you want the output to look like? What have you tried so far?

When you say "create a table", I think of something with some borders and formatting---such as you would do in a word processor.

In lower-level tools you can arrange data in columns using tabs. Perhaps that is what you meant.

Prior to creating the table, how is your data arranged?---eg is it in an array?

basically i'm extracting data from a text file and i need to output the data with column headings.
the data in the text file has phone numbers, customer details, number of transactions something like

555555 mr smith 6 purchases last purchase october 2009
555123 mrs smith 9 purchases last purchase september 2009
555011 mr blogg 1 purchase last purchase april 2008

I want to be able to output the data in my shell script so it has headings e.g.

customer phone number name number of purchases
555555 mr smith 6
555123 mrs smith 9
555011 mr blogg 1

I've tried looking for solutions but so far only found ones using sql which is no good for me as I'm only doing it for a shell script using a text file

Post what you have so far. Don't forget to use CODE tags.

If the data is set up in the proper order, then perhaps you just need formatting with tabs. Take a look at the "printf" function in AWK. Good AWK tutorial here:
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/

This is basically the code i have at the moment, simpled down for quickness;

echo 'what do you want to find?'
read input
output = grep $input /home/etc/filename
echo $output

this will bring back;

555026 mr smith 1 purchase october 2006

what i want is to have the output to have column headings

something like

number name purchase date
555026 mr smith 1 purchase october 2006

I've tried adding awk function but so far haven't been able to get it to have a name for the column.

Have you looked at printf? I'm pretty sure it provides for literal text as well as printing variables (AKA "fields" in AWK)

Here's a hint:
In this case, I did not enter any formatting codes. The grymoire tutorial shows all the codes (which are--I believe--the same as for the printf function in C.)

I found this while looking on that tutorial, but i had errors while trying to implement it into my shell script. can someone give hints on which part creates the headings for the columns?
BEGIN {
format1 ="%10s %6s\n";
format2 ="%10s %6d\n";
printf(format1, "String", "Number");
}
{
printf(format2, $1, $2);
}

Have you considered using LaTeX? Depending on what you are doing, you might be able to achieve some great results with it. Failing that, perl is also a good candidate.

Anything in BEGIN is only ever done once <hint>

I would also throw in that you can have a look at the column function for processing output too.

If there is a literal string, that's a column heading. If there's a variable,that's data.
Make sense??

ok so with my code, i take the information i need from the text file and that is turned into a string called result which is then cat>result onto screen. would it be easier for me to split up the result somehow, or just try to display it as a whole? The results from the file are always large. I can't even seem to draw a basic table with results in at the moment, let alone give it columns with titles