Best scripting instrument ?

[enrico.nic]

Hi all,
I need to do something simple: from a series of data text files with columns divided by one or more blanks, I need first to count the number of columns (fields), and the print out on stdout the first 6 columns, then the last 31, and then the rest of the columns.
I am obviously in a hurry, and I am facing some problems with a short C program that uses strtok, strcat etc.
Has anyone a better idea than using C ?

Thank you

Enrico

[Mark Grant]

Enrico,

Everyone will have a different view on this but "perl" is going to be heaven for this kind of thing. It is remarkably good and string and data handling. I hardly ever use 'C' these days, it's just so much better to do the thing with perl.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

If the length of the input records does not exceed 3000 characters then awk is probably your quickest to learn method.

Try this, create a file, my.awk:


{
n = split($0,arry)
i = 1; # awk arrays are 1-based
while (i <= 6)
{
printf("%s ",arry[i])
++i
}
i = n - 31;
while (i <= n)
{
printf("%s ",arry[i]);
++i;
}
i = 7;
while (i < (n - 31))
{
printf("%s ",arry[i]);
++i;
}
printf("\n");
}


now awk -f my.awk < infile

If the input lines exceed 3,000 characters then get the Gnu version of awk. My real favorite -- although the learning curve is steeper but worth it -- is Perl. Well. written Perl will execute almost as faat as the C equivalent and code in a fraction of the time --- and port unchanged to Windows.

[enrico.nic]

Thank you all for the prompt reply. The awk solution worked for me.
I should begin to study Perl in the near future ..

Thank you again

Enrico