Kumar Appaiah wrote:
you might want to start by perusing the "sed" manual - it's an even simpler tool, though it might not be powerful enough for what you're doingOn Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 12:12:26PM -0700, Dino Vliet wrote:Dear debian people, Can you help me with this task I have? I have a lot of files in a subdirectory containing the following text:You should use awk. - cut - You ought to read the Awk manual, and then it would be a mattle of a couple of hours of thought at most.
also take a look at: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/10/25-text-batch-processing-tools-reviewed/not Unix, but a collection of various visual tools for processing text in batches
looks to me like your biggest problem is that each file has several sections, each in different formats, so it's not just a matter getting everything into a uniform tabular structure for import into a spreadsheet. You might want to think of this as a several step process that either: a. breaks each file into several files, each of a uniform format, then process each type of file separately, or b, c. process each file to normalize it into something that's easier to turn into csv format
Or, as someone suggested - hire someone. This is the silly kind of task that's really easy if your facile with regular expressions, shell scripts, and such; but can end up taking forever to get right. Judging from the sample data, I'm guessing your at a university, there should be enough student hackers around who work cheap.
Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In<fnord> practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra