Help needed in character replacement in Korn Shell

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

How do I replace a space " " character at a particular position in a line?

e.g. I have a file below

$ cat i2
111 002 A a
33 0011 B c
2222 003 C a

I want all the 1st spaces to be replaced with forward slash "/" and the 3rd spaces to have 5 spaces to get the output below:

111/002 AAA     a
33/0011 BBB     c
2222/003 CCC     b

I created a shell which would achieve this but I'm looking for a easier way.

$ cat test.ksh
#!/bin/ksh

cut -d' ' -f1 < $1 > 1st_word
cut -d' ' -f3 < $1 > 3rd_word

while read line
do

sed -e "s/$line /$line\//g" $1 | grep $line

done < 1st_word > tmp_ouput


while read line
do

sed -e "s/$line /$line     /g" tmp_ouput1 | grep $line

done < 3rd_word

Any help will be appreciated

Steve

2 
$ cat file
111 002 A a
33 0011 B c
2222 003 C a
$ sed -e "s; ;/;1" -e "s/ /     /2" file
111/002 A     a
33/0011 B     c
2222/003 C     a
3

Try this..

sed -e 's/ /\//' -e 's/\(.* .*\)\( .*\)/\1    \2/' filename

Output:

cat temp
111 002 A a
33 0011 B c
2222 003 C a
sed -e 's/ /\//' -e 's/\(.* .*\)\( .*\)/\1    \2/' temp
111/002 A     a
33/0011 B     c
2222/003 C     a
4

Depending on your version of sed something like this may work for you:

$ sed -e 's! !/!1' -e 's/ /     /2' infile > outfile

If that doesn't work, the "longhand" version will....

$ sed -e 's/^\([^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\) \(.*\)$/\1\/\2 \3     \4/' infile > outfile

Cheers
ZB

5 
sed 's/ /\//;s/ \(.\)$/    \1/' file
6

That's exactly what I wanted!

Thank you all for your quick response!!!

Cheers
Steve

7 
sed 's/ /\//;s/ \(.\)$/    \1/' file

Hi matrixmadhan, can you explain what mean your code?

Thank you

regards,

heru

8 
printf "%s/%s %s%5s\n" $(<inputfile)
9

following are the blocks in the code,

s/ /\// - this first substitution block replaces the first occuring space character to a forward slash, since thats a special character to nullify its special meaning precede it by a back slash

s/ \(.\)$/ - the second substitution block replaces the space and any character at the end with the below replacement below

\\1/     - this would effectively replace it with 5 spaces and the selected block

:slight_smile: