[SOLVED] List arrange on terminal

freeroute · 11-25-2016, 10:45 AM

I have a big list like this (before the names there are empty spaces):

Nicolaes Tulp (1593–1674), physician, surgeon and mayor of Amsterdam
Gustav de Vries (1866–1934), mathematician
Hugo de Vries (1848–1937), geneticist

I would like to cut only names.
So the list should be:

Nicolaes Tulp
Gustav de Vries
Hugo de Vries

How could I do that?
I tried

Code:

tr -d ' \t' <inputfile>outputfile

But the result was:
NicolaesTulp
GustavdeVries
HugodeVries

Thank you in advance.

rtmistler · 11-25-2016, 11:04 AM

Hi,

How about trying:

Code:

 cut -d '(' -f1 <inputfile> > <outputfile>

What this does is "cuts" fields (-f) from the input file and puts them to stdout. You redirect to a file using the ">". -d specifies the delimiter, which in this case is the first parenthesis '(' and you wish only the first field prior to that delimiter.

Example:

Code:

$ cat 1.txt
Nicolaes Tulp (1593–1674), physician, surgeon and mayor of Amsterdam
Gustav de Vries (1866–1934), mathematician
Hugo de Vries (1848–1937), geneticist
$
$ cut -d ' ' -f1-2 1.txt
Nicolaes Tulp
Gustav de
Hugo de

crazy-yiuf · 11-25-2016, 11:13 AM

You can also use sed to match everything up to the parenthesis.

Code:

sed 's/\(^[a-zA-Z ]*\)(.*/\1/1' list.txt

freeroute · 11-25-2016, 11:14 AM

@rtmistler
Thanks your advise. Working.
Almost good. I have 5 space characters before every name in my list and I would like to cut these, too. It is not shown my original post.

crazy-yiuf · 11-25-2016, 11:27 AM

Then you can do:

Code:

sed 's/^[ ]*\([a-zA-Z ]*\)(.*/\1/1' list.txt

Sed's a pain, but extremely useful. Especially if you're a programmer and need to refactor array[0][1] to getArray(0,1), or something like that.

rtmistler · 11-25-2016, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by freeroute

@rtmistler
Thanks your advise. Working.
Almost good. I have 5 space characters before every name in my list and I would like to cut these, too. It is not shown my original post.

Quote:

Originally Posted by crazy-yiuf

Then you can do:

Code:

sed 's/^[ ]*\([a-zA-Z ]*\)(.*/\1/1' list.txt

Sed's a pain, but extremely useful. Especially if you're a programmer and need to refactor array[0][1] to getArray(0,1), or something like that.

crazy-yiuf has it correct; however in the event that you encounter a TAB as opposed to spaces, you may wish to include a search for TAB in the regex:

Code:

 sed 's/^[ \t]*\([a-zA-Z ]*\)(.*/\1/1' list.txt

pan64 · 11-25-2016, 01:24 PM

and you can do it in two steps, like:

Code:

sed 's/^[ \t]*//; s/[ \t]*(.*//'

the first one will remove the spaces before, the second one will remove ( and everything afterward. But remember it may not work properly if you have more than one (.