Question

I’m trying to read file line by line in bash.

Every line has format as follows text|number.

I want to produce file with format as follows text,text,text etc. so new file would have just text from previous file separated by comma.

Here is what I’ve tried and couldn’t get it to work :

FILENAME=$1

OLD_IFS=$IFSddd
IFS=$'\n'
i=0
for line in $(cat "$FILENAME"); do
    array=(`echo $line | sed -e 's/|/,/g'`)
    echo ${array[0]}
    i=i+1;
done
IFS=$OLD_IFS

But this prints both text and number but in different format text number

here is sample input :

dsadadq-2321dsad-dasdas|4212
dsadadq-2321dsad-d22as|4322

here is sample output:

dsadadq-2321dsad-dasdas,dsadadq-2321dsad-d22as

What did I do wrong?

Answer 1

Not pure bash, but you could do this in awk:

awk -F'|' 'NR>1{printf(",")} {printf("%s",$1)}'

Alternately, in pure bash and without having to strip the final comma:

#/bin/bash

# You can get your input from somewhere else if you like. Even stdin to the script.
input=$'dsadadq-2321dsad-dasdas|4212\ndsadadq-2321dsad-d22as|4322\n'

# Output should be reset to empty, for safety.
output=""

# Step through our input.  (I don't know your column names.)
while IFS='|' read left right; do
  # Only add a field if it exists.  Salt to taste.
  if [[ -n "$left" ]]; then
    # Append data to output string
    output="${output:+$output,}$left"
  fi
done <<< "$input"

echo "$output"