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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T03:53:09+00:00

Hey all, I have been doing nothing but web development over the last few

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Hey all, I have been doing nothing but web development over the last few years and haven’t written any Java or C++ in what feels like forever. I don’t necessarily need to use these languages, so I’m entirely open to suggestion. I was given an email list by a client to import into their mailchimp account yesterday and unfortunately, Mailchimp couldn’t read the file. It’s a text file, but I don’t believe it’s tab delimited (which would make this much, much easier for me).

A small portion of the file (I’ve changed last names and email addresses) can be viewed here: http://sparktoignite.com/patients.txt

If anyone has suggestions on how I can get this into a Mailchimp readable format (csv, tab delimited txt, excel) please let me know. I feel like 3 years ago I would’ve been able to do this in a matter of minutes, but given that I haven’t touched anything other than RoR, PHP, and jQuery for the last few years, I don’t know where to start.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In bash, outputs TAB delimited file:

    cat patients.txt | tr -d [[:blank:]] | tr "|" "\t" > output.txt

    If you prefer csv, just change the last "\t" to ",":

    cat patients.txt | tr -d [[:blank:]] | tr "|" "\t" > output.txt

    It messes up the header though. If you need to preserve header, first couple of lines need to be skipped:

    head -n2 > output.txt
tail -n+3 | tr -d [[:blank:]] | tr "|" "\t" >> output.txt
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