Re: [FWP] joining columns in csv files

[Josh L Rabinowitz <joshr@joshr.com>]

There's no way this is going to be fast, but Text::CSV_XS would be perfect 
for this problem.
my $.02
joshr

On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, fergal daly wrote:

> Here's a problem that occurred on a list I'm on. Someone has a csv file
> with 8 columns and they want to merge colums 4, 5, 6 and 7. So 
> 
> 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 => 1,2,3,4567,8,9
> 
> there were various shots involving sed, awk and perl. The perl ones
> tended to use split and join or just the obvious substitution using lots
> of parentheses. Here's what I came up with
> 
> The first one only works becuase the fields to be joined are adjacent
> but I like it becuase I've never seen this before
> 
> perl -pi -e 's/((?:.*?,){3})(.*?),/$1$2/' filename filename filename
> 
> the second one was shorter than anything else offered and is kinda
> perverse
> 
> perl -pe '$i=1;s/,/$i++=~m#4|5|6#?"":","/ge'
> 
> it is also quite general, you just replace 4|5|6 with whatever you want,
> to eliminate commas in different positions, although you have to anchor
> the inner regex if you have too many columns as double digits could mess
> things up. IE
> 
> perl -pe '$i=1;s/,/$i++=~m#^4|5|6$#?"":","/ge'
> 
> which is robust, general, short and fun.
> 
> Anyone fancy a go?
> 
> Fergal
> 
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