Splitting String Using Delimiter in unix

Contributed by bashamsc On 15th February, 2013

This is an article on Splitting String Using Delimiter in unix in Unix.

Now let us try to do same in Unix as we have discussed in the following Article - Splitting String Using Delimiter in Oracle

In Unix it is pretty simple. We can use below commands to split

Code:

echo "GO 4 EXPERT|99999|20130101|20131231"|cut -f1 -d"|"

or

Code:

echo "GO 4 EXPERT|99999|20130101|20131231"|awk -F"|" '{print $1}

Code:

echo "GO 4 EXPERT|99999|20130101|20131231"|cut -f2 -d"|"

or

Code:

echo "GO 4 EXPERT|99999|20130101|20131231"|awk -F"|" '{print $2}

Code:

echo "GO 4 EXPERT|99999|20130101|20131231"|cut -f3 -d"|"

or

Code:

echo "GO 4 EXPERT|99999|20130101|20131231"|awk -F"|" '{print $3}

Code:

echo "GO 4 EXPERT|99999|20130101|20131231"|cut -f4 -d"|"

or

Code:

echo "GO 4 EXPERT|99999|20130101|20131231"|awk -F"|" '{print $4}

But this not universal. Now we will try to write a universal code which work for all as we have seen in above thread.

Let us suppose we have a file called file_string.txt and which has below data

Code:

GO 4 EXPERT|99999|20130101|20131231
ABCD|345|99999|123|2034123
XYZXYZ|345|99999|123|2034123|20131231

We need to write output to another file called file_split.txt

The output will look as below

Code:

GO 4 EXPERT
99999
20130101
20131231
ABCD
345
99999
123
2034123
XYZXYZ
345
99999
123
2034123
20131231

Now we can observe that the first sting has 3 delimiters , second has 4 and third has 5.

Below code will split the string's and writes to a file.

Code:

while read line    
do    

	counter=`echo $line | tr -cd  '|' |wc -c`
	
	counter=`expr $counter + 1`
	
	cnt=1
	
	while [[ $counter -gt 0 ]]  

	do

  	
	split=`echo $line |cut -f$cnt -d"|"`

	counter=`expr $counter - 1`

	cnt=`expr $cnt + 1`

	echo $split>>file_split.txt

	done				
	
						

done <file_string.txt

In above tr command will work similar to regexp_replace and wc -c acts similar to length in oracle.

The tr -cd '|' will delete the characters and displays only delimiter and wc -c will count the characters.

As we see no. of strings are no. of delimiter's plus one. So we have used counter + 1 in the code as we can see same in oracle code also.

shabbir likes this

David Ledger Newbie Member
11Mar2013,18:11	#2
	A much easier solution is $ echo "GO 4 EXPERT\|99999\|20130101\|20131231" \| tr "\|" "\n" David shabbir likes this