Question

I’m having trouble with data manipulation in a txt file. My file currently looks like this:

    HG02239 -23.42333333
    NA06985NA06985  -20.125
    NA06991NA06991  -20.92

This shows some of my tab-delimited data. Half the entries are in the correct seven-characters (letterletternumbernumbernumbernumbernumber) format, but some are doubled up. I want to go into the second column (first column is empty for a reason!) and remove the repeats in the string so it would read

    HG02239 -23.42333333
    NA06985  -20.125
    NA06991  -20.92

I can’t work out how to do this with sed/awk on a per column basis. I feel like I should be able to write a regex, but because the data is a repeat, I don’t want to lose the first half of the string; and I can’t work out how to cut on a specific column, or I would just delete the 7th character. Any help much appreciated!

Answer 1

One way, using awk:

awk '{ print substr($1, 1, 7), $2 }' file.txt

Output:

HG02239 -23.42333333
NA06985 -20.125
NA06991 -20.92