Question

I have text file with something like

first line
line nr 2
line three

etc

And i want to generate

"first line",
"line nr 2",
"line three",

I wonder how to do this in python or maybe in bash if it’s easier/quicker. I know there is different code for opening file and different for reading only one line in python(?) but i’m not sure which option to use in this case and, more importantly, how to add these characters. Any advice would help.

Answer 1

A number of easy ways to do it…

A simple perl oneliner:

perl -pi -e 's/^(.*)$/\"$1\",/g' /path/to/your/file

To explain a bit, the regex ^(.*)$ grabs everything (the (.*)) between the start of the line (^) and the end of the line ($), then uses the $1 match group variable to reconstruct it with the quotes and comma.