Shell script question using sed or awk

[Unix or Linux?]

How do i convert individual characters to upper case and also remove redundant characters at the same time. My data is the following

john.doe


How do i convert it to:

John Doe

[Ivan Ferreira]

Try this:

echo john.doe |tr [:lower:] [:upper:] |tr . " "

[Unix or Linux?]

I think that will convert everything to upper case whereas I need specific characters converted. I need the first character and the character after the full stop.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

# echo "john doe"|perl -ne '@a=split;foreach (@a) {push @b,ucfirst};print "@b\n"'

Regards!

...JRF...

[Unix or Linux?]

Great thank you, it worked. Is there any way that this can be done with awk or sed?

[Ivan Ferreira]

Try with this:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
# convert upper case letters to lower case
BEGIN {
SEPARATOR_CHAR=".";
LC="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
UC="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
}
{
out="";
separator=0;
# look at each character
for(i=1;i<=length($0);i++) {
# get the character to be checked
char=substr($0,i,1);
j=index(LC,char);
# is it the first letter?
if (( i == 1 ) || ( separator == 1 )) {
# print (char);
out = out substr(UC,j,1);
separator = 0;
}
else if (char == SEPARATOR_CHAR ) {
char=" ";
out = out char
separator=1
} else {
out = out char;
}

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

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again):

With 'awk' the problem becomes more tedious since you would have to isolate the first character of each "word" (say with 'substr'); convert it to uppercase with 'toupper'; and then convert the remaining characters of that word to lowercase with 'tolower'. Perl offers far, far many more features than does 'awk'.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Unix or Linux?]

ok but the problem is I dont understand the statement

echo "john doe"|perl -ne '@a=split;foreach (@a) {push @b,ucfirst};print "@b\n"'



Could you give an explanation of the statement.
Thank you

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again):

# echo "john doe"|perl -ne '@a=split;foreach (@a) {push @b,ucfirst};print "@b\n"'

The perl switch '-n' says create a read loop. For every line read, split on whitespace (blanks, or tabs) the line's elements into a list called "a". Now, walk each element of list "a", and uppercase the first character of each element. As you do this, "push" (store) the result into a new list called "b". When every element in a line has been handled, print the modified line.

You could use this with a file, like:

# perl -ne '@a=split;foreach (@a) {push @b,ucfirst};print "@b\n"' yourfile

Regards!

...JRF...

[Unix or Linux?]

Great but it doesnt seem to append to a file. All the other statments do append to a file. My code is as follows:

> testFile
printf "\n" >> testFile
echo "john.doe"|perl -ne '@a=split;foreach (@a) {push @b,ucfirst};print "@b\n\n"' >> testFile
ps -U john.doe >> testFile


Its only the echo line that is not appending to testFile. Any ideas why?