Question

Am using Windows 7 & gawk 3.1.3 (via UnxUtils).

I’d like to turn this input (Liverpool FC’s fixtures):

Sunday, 27 November 2011
Barclays Premier League
Liverpool v Man City, 16:00
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
Carling Cup
Chelsea v Liverpool, QF, 19:45
...

into a tab-separated file, such as:

Sunday, 27 November 2011<tab>Barclays Premier League<tab>Liverpool v Man City, 16:00
Tuesday, 29 November 2011<tab>Carling Cup<tab>Chelsea v Liverpool, QF, 19:45
...

I’ve tried doing this with awk, but failed thus far. Identifying every first and second line is easy enough:

if (NR % 3 == 1 || NR % 3 == 2) print;

but despite many attempts (usually resulting in syntax errors) can’t find out how to strip out the (Windows) line-endings and concatenate those with every third line.

I’m now wondering if awk is actually the right tool for the job.

Thanks for any pointers.

Answer 1

awk '(NR % 3) > 0 {printf("%s\t",$0)}
     (Nr % 3) == 0 {printf("%s\n",$0)}

Should work. For every line where the modulo of NR (number of records) is not 0 it will print the line and a tab character. Otherwise the (input) line and a newline character.

HTH