Re: Manipulating file content

[Bolan Meek <Bolan.Meek@wcom.com>]

Viktor Rosenfeld wrote:
> 
> Hi list,
> 
> this one is for all the regexp, shell, and editing-experts...

How about us perl hackers, hunh?!  Got sumpin' g'inst us, buddy!?

> Suppose I have a comma-seperated or tab-seperated file and I want
> to flip the lines and columns.  So an input file like:
> 
>         a,1,A
>         b,2,B
>         c,3,C
> 
> would be transformed into:
> 
>         a,b,c
>         1,2,3
>         A,B,C
> 
> Is there an fast and easy way of doing this?  Ideally through the shell
> or with VIM.  I would RTFM, but I have no clue which manual to read.

Well, you could use regexp in sed, or use an awk script, but if
I had only 3x3 matrices to transform, in text, I'd
perl -e 'for ($i=0;$i<3;++$i){<>;@entry = split ',';print
"$i[0],$i[1],$i[2]\n";}'
with a file directed into it, and stdout redirected to a file.

Matrixes with unpredetermined columns or rows become slightly
trickier, but only by 1) keeping track of the length/breadth, and
2) nesting another loop.

> 
> TIA,

YWATF

(You're Welcome After The Fact)