Removing field separators in a txt file

[Chern Jian Leaw]

HI,

I have a text file as in:

avbg,yuyu,ppp,ii,
jkdsk,opop,ye82,jj,
jkds,llkl ....(and more...)

Is there a utility in UNIX which moves each entries that are separated by the commas to a new line, by discarding the commas, besides using AWK...??

If so, please provide an example.

Thanks.

[John Carr_2 · Accepted solution]

Hi

cat testfile | tr -s "," "\n"

cheers
John.

[Trond Haugen]

As I love vi:
:g/,/s//^M/g
The ^M is CTRL-V CTRL-M

Or with sed:
cat your_file | tr "," "\012"

Regards,
Trond

[Steve Steel]

Hi

For Your interest

file=$1
export IFS=,
cat $file|while read line
do
for f in $line
do
echo $f
done
done

Steve Steel

[Robin Wakefield]

Hi,

Well, you did say besides AWK, so here's a perl method:

cat file|perl -F, -ane 'foreach $f (@F){chomp $f;print "$f\n"};'

Rgds, Robin

[Stefan Schulz]

Hi,

the fastest way is to use tr:

tr ',' '\n' < oldfile > newfile

If you are allready in vi to do some more work on this file:

:1,$s/,/^M/g

Hope this helps

Regards Stefan

[Darrell Allen]

Hi,

Here's the sed method:
sed 's/,//g' file

Note that it is actually entered as 2 lines whether in a script or from a shell prompt (command line).

"tr" is faster. Also note the difference with and without tr's "-s" option. With "-s", repeated characters to be translated (commas in your case) are treated as one occurance. That is, consecutive commas will be replaced with one newline. Without "-s", each comma will be replaced with a newline.

Darrell

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Robin, you're almost there :)
use @F in string context and set it's separator to the newline:

perl -naF, -e '$"="\n";print"@F"'

shorter and more obfuscated (set list separator to default input record separator):

perl -naF, -e '$"=$/;print"@F"'

[Darrell Allen]

Hi again,

I keep forgetting that 2 line sed examples don't get posted correctly. Didn't check my reply until now. It should look more like:
sed 's/,/
/g' file

There should be a "\" character at the end of the first line.

Please see the attached.

Darrell

[Mahima Kaushik_2]

Hi Chern,
This note is just to remind you to assign points to the forum members who have been responding to your questions (you have at least 3 thread open currently). It would not only be nice for them since they have been helping you but also be helpful for others to know whether your problem has been solved or not.
Thanks!
Mahima