Question

I recently asked a question on the same forum and found a solution for it. Unfortunately, it has to be converted to UNIX. The issue was to merge lines from a csv file. Each line should end with a semi-colon (;) and if it doesn’t combine the next line into it until find a semicolon again.

the solution that worked for me was

@echo off
setlocal disableDelayedExpansion
set "ln="
for /f delims^=^ eol^= %%i in (myfile.txt) do (
    set "var=%%i"
    setlocal enableDelayedExpansion
    if "!var:~-1!"==";" (echo !var!>>temp.csv) else (<nul set /p ="!var!">>temp.csv)
    endlocal
)

Would it be possible to convert to UNIX script?

Link to the original post is: Merge line with the next line if last character is a semicolon using batch file

Answer 1

next time if you want to do text processing, don’t go to windows. 😀

given that you have:

A;1;abc;<xml/>;
;2;def;<xml
>hello world</xml>;
;3;ghi;<xml/>;

your rule is:

I need to combine lines such that if the line doesn’t end end with a
semicolon (;), combine the next line into the current line.

awk '!/;$/{l=l""$0;next;}{print l""$0;l=""}' file

test

kent$  echo "A;1;abc;<xml/>;
;2;def;<xml
>hello world</xml>;
;3;ghi;<xml/>;"|awk '!/;$/{l=l""$0;next;}{print l""$0;l=""}'
A;1;abc;<xml/>;
;2;def;<xml>hello world</xml>;
;3;ghi;<xml/>;

and it works in this case too:

kent$  cat ttt
A;1;abc;<xml/>;
;2;def;<xml
>h
e
l
l
o w
o
rld<
/xm
l>;
;3;ghi;<xml/>;

kent$  awk '!/;$/{l=l""$0;next;}{print l""$0;l=""}' ttt
A;1;abc;<xml/>;
;2;def;<xml>hello world</xml>;
;3;ghi;<xml/>;