How to split strings from seperators

[Henry Chua]

Hi Guys

Is there any way to convert "07/22/2005,19:22:54" to
07222005192254 i.e. get rid of all the seperator in between such as "/", "," and ":"..
I tried using sscanf but it doesnt seems to work.

and sadly I can only use C programming...

Best regards
Henry

[john korterman]

Hi,
a simple way is to delete them, e.g.:
# echo "07/22/2005,19:22:54"| tr -d "\/|,|:"

regards,
John K.

[Andrew Merritt_2 · Accepted solution]

Do you mean 'is there a single library call that will do the operation in one go'? Not sure there is.

There's several trivial ways you could do this using simple C code, e.g. just reading the string a byte at a time and not copying those characters that appear in a second string.

You could also do something similar using 'strtok()', with the second string being the set of delimiters, and just build up the target string from the returned substrings.

Andrew

[Rick Garland]

If what you are interested in is having the appropriate date conversion;

date +%m%d%Y%H%M%S

will get that same output...

[Tom Schroll]

Henry,

Here is a "C" solution that I threw together in a few minutes. No warranty implied or expressed. :-)

(Attached is a Notepad text file version preserving indentations). Good luck.


#include
#include
#include
#include

#define MAXTOK 255
#define MAXBUF 1024

int main()
{
int i = 0;
char *string = "07/22/2005,19:22:54";
char *delims = "/,:";
char *tokens[MAXTOK];
char *buffer;
char **x;

/* Allocate a static buffer */
/* NOTE: there are all kinds of do's and don'ts about using malloc. */
/* Please research the correct/safe method for your site. */
if( (buffer = malloc(MAXBUF)) == NULL )
{
fprintf( stderr, "ERROR: malloc() failed.\n" );
exit( 1 );
}

/* Initialize the buffer to all NULLs */
memset( buffer, '\0', MAXBUF );

/* Use strtok to break strings up by delimiters */
tokens[0] = strtok(string, delims);
while (tokens[++i] = strtok(NULL, delims));

/* Pointer arithmetic ahead; not for the faint of heart */
x = tokens;
while( *x != NULL )
{
/* printf( "%s\n", *x ); */
strcat( buffer, *x );
x++;
}

printf( "%s\n", buffer );
}


-- Tom

[Henry Chua]

Thanks guys for your help.. i have implemented my solution using Strtok();