Question

I’m looking for a shell one-liner that will parse the following example currency string PHP10000 into $245. I need to parse the number from the string, multiply it with a preset conversion factor then add a “$” prefix to the result.

So far, what I have is only this:

echo PHP10000 | sed -e 's/PHP//'

which gives 10000 as result.

Now, I’m stuck on how to do multiplication on that result.

I’m thinking awk could also give a solution to this but I’m a beginner at shell commands.

Update:

I tried:

echo PHP10000 | expr `sed -e 's/PHP//'` \* 2

and the multiplication works properly only on whole numbers. I can’t use floating point numbers as it gives me this error: expr: not a decimal number: '2.1'.

Answer 1

One way:

echo "PHP10000" | awk -F "PHP" '{ printf "$%d\n", $2 * .0245 }'

Results:

$245

Or to print to two decimal places:

echo "PHP10000" | awk -F "PHP" '{ printf "$%.2f\n", $2 * .0245 }'

Results:

$245.00

EDIT:

Bash doesn’t support floating point operations. Use bc instead:

echo "PHP10000" | sed 's/PHP\([0-9]\+\)/echo "scale=2; \1*.0245\/1" | bc/e'

Results:

245.00