Question

I have 3 tsv files containing different data on my employees. I can join these data with the last name and first name of the employees, which appear in each file.

I would like to gather all the data for each employee in only one spreadsheet.

(I can’t just do copy/past of the columns because some employees are not in file number 2 for example but will be in file number 3).

So I think – I am a beginner – a script could do that, for each employee (a row), gather as much data as possible from the files in a new tsv file.

Edit.
Example of what I have (in reality I have approximatively 300 rows for each file, some emloyees are not in all files).

file 1

     john      hudson     03/03    male
     mary      kate       34/04    female
     harry     loup       01/01    male

file 2

     harry     loup     1200$

file3

    mary     kate     atlanta

What I want :

    column1    colum2    column3     column4    column5    column6
    john       hudson     03/03      male
    mary       kate       34/04      female    atlanta
    harry      loup       01/01      male                 1200$

It would help me a lot!

Answer 1

Use this python script:

import sys, re

r=[]
i = 0
res = []
for f in sys.argv[1:]:
    r.append({})
    for l in open(f):
        a,b = re.split('\s+', l.rstrip(), 1)
        r[i][a] = b
        if i == 0:
            res += [a]
    i += 1

for l in res:
    print l," ".join(r[k].get(l, '-') for k in range(i))

The script loads each file into the dictionary (the first column is used as a key).
Then the script iterates through the values of the first column in the first file and
writes correspondent values from the dictionaries (that were created from the other files).

Example of usage:

$ cat 1.txt 
user1 100
user2 200
user3 300
$ cat 2.txt 
user2 2200
user3 2300
$ cat 3.txt 
user1 1
user3 3
$ python 1.py [123].txt
user1 100 - 1
user2 200 2200 -
user3 300 2300 3