I've an input.csv file in which columns 2 and 3 have variable lengtt.
100,Short Column, 199
200,Meeedium Column,1254
300,Loooooooooooong Column,35
I'm trying to use the following command to achieve a clean tabulation, but I need to fill the 2nd column with a certain number of blank spaces in order to get a fixed lenght column (let's say that a total lenght of 30 is enough).
awk -F, '{print $1 "\t" $2 "\t" $3;}' input.csv
My current output looks like this:
100 Short Column 199
200 Meeedium Column 1254
300 Loooooooooooong Column 35
And I would like to achieve the following output, by filling 2nd and 3rd column properly:
100 Short Column 199
200 Meeedium Column 1254
300 Loooooooooooong Column 35
Any good idea out there about awk or sed command should be used?
Thanks everybody.
Rather than picking some arbitrary number as the width of each field, do a 2-pass approach where the first pass calculates the max length of each field and the 2nd prints the fields in a width that size plus a couple of spaces between fields:
$ cat tst.awk
BEGIN { FS=" *, *"; OFS=" " }
NR==FNR {
for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {
w[i] = (length($i) > w[i] ? length($i) : w[i])
if ($i ~ /[^0-9]/) {
a[i] = "-"
}
}
next
}
{
for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {
printf "%"a[i]w[i]"s%s", $i, (i<NF ? OFS : ORS)
}
}
$ awk -f tst.awk file file
100 Short Column 199
200 Meeedium Column 1254
300 Loooooooooooong Column 35
The above also uses left-alignment for non-digit fields, right alignment for all-digits fields. It'll work no matter how long the input fields are and no matter how many fields you have:
$ cat file1
100000,Short Column, 199,a
100,Now is the Winter of our discontent with fixed width fields,20000,b
100,Short Column, 199,c
200,Meeedium Column,1254,d
300,Loooooooooooong Column,35,e
$ awk -f tst.awk file1 file1
100000 Short Column 199 a
100 Now is the Winter of our discontent with fixed width fields 20000 b
100 Short Column 199 c
200 Meeedium Column 1254 d
300 Loooooooooooong Column 35 e
Use printf in awk
$ awk -F, '{gsub(/ /, "", $3); printf "%-5s %-25s%5s\n", $1, $2, $3}' file input.csv
100 Short Column 199
200 Meeedium Column 1254
300 Loooooooooooong Column 35
What I have done above, is set the IFS,field separator to ,; since the file has some white-spaces in the 3rd column alone, it mangles, how printf processes the strings, removing it with gsub and formatting in C-style printf.
Solution using perl
$ perl -pe 's/([^,]+),([^,]+),([^,]+)/sprintf "%-6s%-30s%5s", $1,$2,$3/e' input.csv
100 Short Column 199
200 Meeedium Column 1254
300 Loooooooooooong Column 35
