Cut a file delimited on a number with one or more digits

awkcutperlregular expressionsed

I'm looking for a way to extract the first column of a text file that has no specific delimiters except for arbitrary digits that begin the next column. Example:

John Smith 1234 Main Street
Amy Brown and Sally Williams 9 Drury Lane
Sunny's 1000 Brown Avenue

Expected output would be:

John Smith
Amy Brown and Sally Williams
Sunny's

It appears that cut doesn't support functionality such as cut file.txt -d {0..9} -f 1

Solutions can use any standard unix utility.

Best Answer

$ awk -F'[0-9]' '{ print $1 }' file
John Smith
Amy Brown and Sally Williams
Sunny's

With -F'[0-9]' we say that digits are to be considered field separators in the input data, and with print $1 we output the first digit-separated field.

Change -F'[0-9]' to -F' *[0-9]' to also get rid of any spaces before the digit.

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Cut with 2 character delimiter

Sample test script that works for me:

#!/bin/sh

raw="1F3C6..1F3CA
1F3CF..1F3D3
1F3E0..1F3F0"

for r in $raw
do
    f1=`echo "${r}" | cut -d'.' -f1`
    f2=`echo "${r}" | cut -d'.' -f2`
    f3=`echo "${r}" | cut -d'.' -f3`
    echo "field 1:[${f1}] field 2:[${f2}] field 3:[${f3}]"
done

exit

And the output is:

field 1:[1F3C6] field 2:[] field 3:[1F3CA]
field 1:[1F3CF] field 2:[] field 3:[1F3D3]
field 1:[1F3E0] field 2:[] field 3:[1F3F0]

Edit

After reading Stéphane Chazelas comment and linked Q&A, I re-wrote the above to remove the loop.

I could not work out a way to remove the loop and keep the parts as variables (for example; $f1, $f2 and $f3 in my original answer) that could be passed around. Still I don't know what was required output in the original question.

First, still using cut:

#!/bin/sh
raw="1F3C6..1F3CA
1F3CF..1F3D3
1F3E0..1F3F0"

printf '%s\n' "${raw}" | cut -d'.' -f1,3

Which will output:

1F3C6.1F3CA
1F3CF.1F3D3
1F3E0.1F3F0

Could replace the displayed . with any string using the --output-delimiter=STRING.

Next, with sed instead of cut in order to give more control of the output:

#!/bin/sh
raw="1F3C6..1F3CA
1F3CF..1F3D3
1F3E0..1F3F0"

printf '%s\n' "${raw}" | sed 's/^\(.*\)\.\.\(.*\)$/field 1 [\1] field 2 [\2]/'

And this will render:

field 1 [1F3C6] field 2 [1F3CA]
field 1 [1F3CF] field 2 [1F3D3]
field 1 [1F3E0] field 2 [1F3F0]

How to use sed to replace two instances of the same digits separated by a slash with one instance of those digits

The version of OSX's sed is quite annoying (it's actually the BSD's version). I usually install GNU's sed via brew:

$ brew search sed
==> Formulae
gnu-sed ✔             libxdg-basedir        minised               ssed

==> Casks
eclipse-dsl                                  marsedit
exoduseden                                   microsoft-bing-ads-editor
focused                                      osxfuse-dev
google-adwords-editor                        physicseditor
lego-mindstorms-education-ev3                prefs-editor
licensed                                     subclassed-mnemosyne

Install it:

$ brew install gnu-sed

You can then use it like so:

$ gsed ....

And voila, your example now works:

$ echo 'text (1984/1984) text' | sed -E 's_\(([0-9]{4})/\1\)_\(\1\)_g'
text (1984/1984) text
$ echo 'text (1984/1984) text' | gsed -E 's_\(([0-9]{4})/\1\)_\(\1\)_g'
text (1984) text

References

Differences between sed on Mac OSX and other "standard" sed?

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Cut with 2 character delimiter

How to use sed to replace two instances of the same digits separated by a slash with one instance of those digits

References

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