Cut command with dynamic passing of delimiter and position values

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi All,

We have a requirement of picking nth position value by using cut command. value would be delimited by any symbols. We have to pass delimited value and postition to get the value in a string.

ex.

echo "A,B,C,D,E" |cut -d "," -f3
echo "A|B|C|D|E"|cut -d "|" -f2

Kindly frame the unix command to to get both output in a single command by passing delimited value and position dynmically.

Thanks in advance.

2
Moderator comments were removed during original forum migration.
3

Here is a solution in awk. Pass delimiter plus required position.

$ cat kk230689 
awk -v A="$*" '
BEGIN { split(A, want)}
{ for (i in want) {
      p=substr(want,2)
      v=substr(want,1,1)
      if (split($0, flds, v) >= p)
         print flds[p]
  }
}'

$ cat infile
A,B,C,D,E
A|B|C|D|E

$ ./kk230689 ',3' '|2' < infile
C
B
4

Thanks Chubler,

You have written both o/p in single query , but our requirement is to pass the delimited value and position as a paramter and get respective result.

Example:
Input parameter will receive deifference format.
option1 :
A,B,C,D,E,F
Option2 :
A|B|C|D|E

for the above option , unix command should be static by passing paramter as delimited and position.

my workaround code :

echo "A,B,C,D,E"|cut -d "," -f2
echo "A|B|C|D|E"|cut -d "|" -f3
"," -f2 - these value should be dynamic..

Can you plz help on this.

5

If I read you correctly you wish to dynamically change the delimiter used by cut:

DELIM=,
echo "a,b,c,d,e" | cut -d "$DELIM" -f 3
DELIM="|"
echo "A|B|C|D|E" | cut -d "$DELIM" -f 2

Or is it a case you don't know whether the delimiter will be comma, a pipe or something else?

echo "A|B|C|D|E" | tr '|;' ',,' | cut -d "," -f 2
echo "a;b;c;d;e" | awk -F"[,|;]" '{print $3}'

All the above are simplistic examples.

Andrew

1 Like
6

Why not a function with what you already have?

CUTDLFLD() { cut -d"$1" -f"$2" ${3:--}; }

Call like

echo "a,b,c,d,e" | CUTDLFLD "," "3"