deleting pipes in a particular filed

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

i have a file with some records seperated by pipe. I am getting unwanted "|" in the 7th field and i want to remove any pipes in the
7th field only. Can somebody help out? Here is the sample record.

460625192|432559595|MANU MC|2013/12/01||2007/09/24|-R@a{[^U|O?6-\u??^L ?|100|5|Y|||1|9100380020070924|2007/10/10 20:40:21|9999/12/31 01:00:00|Y|54113|OPUS|PLASTIC|X13253U89MCKA|1|2007/10/10 20:40:21

2

Hi.

How would a program determine that there is an embedded symbol, as opposed to the normal field separator symbol? Is there some unique context in which the embedded symbol appears?

Off-hand, I'd say that this would need to be taken care of when the file is created ... cheers, drl

3

Hi.

Here is one kind of solution. It depends on accepting that the first line has the correct number of fields, and that all errors ( extra separators ) are confined to a single field. In this example, that's field 3. If an anomaly occurs, then the extra separator is removed.

#!/usr/bin/env sh

# @(#) a1       Demonstrate embedded field separator correction.

set -o nounset
echo

## Use local command version for the commands in this demonstration.

echo "(Versions used in this script displayed with local utility "version")"
version bash awk

echo

# Create data file.

cat >data1 <<'EOF'
now|is|the|time
for|all|go|od|men
to|come|to|the
aid|of|their|country
EOF

# This assumes that if an embedded separator appears, it will be
# in field 3, and so the separator number 3 will be replaced with
# the null string.  This is essentially a trial-and-error
# solution.

echo " Data file:"
cat data1

echo
echo " Results of correction:"
awk '
BEGIN   { FS = "|" }
NR == 1 { f = NF }
        {
                if ( NF != f ) {
                        print " BANG! found discrepancy at line", NR # remove as desired
                        $0 = gensub("[|]","",3,$0)
                }
                print $0
        }
' data1

exit 0

Producing:

% ./a1

(Versions used in this script displayed with local utility version)
GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i386-pc-linux-gnu)
GNU Awk 3.1.4

 Data file:
now|is|the|time
for|all|go|od|men
to|come|to|the
aid|of|their|country

 Results of correction:
now|is|the|time
 BANG! found discrepancy at line 2
for|all|good|men
to|come|to|the
aid|of|their|country

See man pages for details, modify as necessary ... cheers, drl

4

TRY THIS OUT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

cut -d'|' -f7,8 filename | tr -d '|'