topic Re: Join lines into one line in Operating System - HP-UX

Join lines into one line

wojtek75 — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:20:38 GMT

Hi,

I have a text file which includes undefined number of lines as follows:
====file.txt====
line1
line2
line3
line4
[...]
lineN
============

What command should I use to have the output like that:
line1,line2,line3,line4,[...],lineN

awk is very welcome. Thanks in advance

Re: Join lines into one line

Matti_Kurkela — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:38:23 GMT

tr '\n' ',' < file.txt

MK

Re: Join lines into one line

Steven Schweda — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:47:57 GMT

> tr '\n' ',' < file.txt

And, to trim off the final comma:

< file.txt tr '\n' ',' | sed -e 's/,$//'

Re: Join lines into one line

Viktor Balogh — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:48:08 GMT

or

# cat file.txt | xargs

Re: Join lines into one line

wojtek75 — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:49:29 GMT

xargs uses space ' ' instead of comma.

Re: Join lines into one line

Viktor Balogh — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:49:44 GMT

.. if you want it comma-separated:

# cat file.txt | xargs | tr " " ","

Re: Join lines into one line

Viktor Balogh — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:11:58 GMT

> awk is very welcome. Thanks in advance

here is your AWKward solution:

# awk '{printf $0","} END {print}' file.txt

Re: Join lines into one line

Steven Schweda — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:14:53 GMT

> # cat file.txt | xargs | tr " " ","

Not so good if the lines contain spaces:

dyi # cat file.txt
line 1
line 2
line 3

dyi # cat file.txt | xargs | tr " " ","
line,1,line,2,line,3

But (this time on a real HP-UX system):

dyi # ( tr '\n' ',' ; echo '' ) < file.txt | sed -e 's/,$//'
line 1,line 2,line 3

(Some "sed" programs don't do well with
unterminated lines, I see. Everything's
complicated.)

Re: Join lines into one line

Steven Schweda — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:17:49 GMT

> # awk '{printf $0","} END {print}' file.txt

Around here, that still has the extra comma
at the end:

dyi # awk '{printf $0","} END {print}' file.txt
line 1,line 2,line 3,

(But it does better with embedded spaces.)

Re: Join lines into one line

Viktor Balogh — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:31:28 GMT

> Around here, that still has the extra comma
at the end

nope, on my linux box it duplicates the last line and so I didn't end up with an extra comma. I just didn't recognize the duplicate.

basically I wanted this version, but somehow the reference to the last line didn't work:

# awk 'NR != "$NR" {printf $0","} END {print}' test

so I ended up with this:

# awk '!(NR-1) {printf $0} NR-1 {printf ","$0} END {print ""}'

which works on linux. (too sad I don't have an HP-UX access at the moment :(

Re: Join lines into one line

Hein van den Heuvel — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 04:47:17 GMT

I know this horse has been beaten but here is how I would deal with the 'extra comma' problem in awk:

$ awk '{printf comma $0; comma=","}' x.txt

so we print a comma BEFORE each fresh line, but we don't want one on the first line, so we set a symbol to the value comma, after the first print.
(and again and again, but awk don't mind that :-).

fwiw,
Hein

Re: Join lines into one line

Jose Mosquera — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 08:57:04 GMT

Hi,

#AUX=`cat file.txt|tr "\n" ","`
#echo $AUX > file.aux
#cat file.aux
line1,line2,line3,line4,...,

Rgds.

Re: Join lines into one line

Viktor Balogh — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 09:41:47 GMT

Hein,

>so we print a comma BEFORE each fresh line, but we don't want one on the first line

that's exactly what I did with

# awk '!(NR-1) {printf $0} NR-1 {printf ","$0} END {print ""}'

but you solution is genious! Maybe an END section just to echo a linefeed after the last line... ;)