How to change a specific character in a file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have a data file with following structure:

a|b|c|d|3|f1|f2|f3
a|b|c|d|5|f1|f2|f3|f4|f5

I want to change this data to:

a|b|c|d|3|f1;f2;f3
a|b|c|d|5|f1;f2;f3;f4;f5

Data in column 5 tells the number of following fields. All fields delimiter after the 5th column needs to be changed to ";"

Please help how can this be done in any scripting language sed, awk or perl?

Regards

Sandeep

2

File

a|b|c|d|3|f1|f2|f3
a|b|c|d|5|f1|f2|f3|f4|f5

3 
awk -F'|' ' {OFS="|";
             six="";
             for(i=6;i<=NF;i++)
                { six=six $i ";" }
             print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,six
           }' filename

input & output:

4

Thanks Jim. It helped me in getting started. Just one followup: If the file is as:

a|b|c|d|3|f;;1;|f2;;0;|f3;;1;
a|b|c|d|5|m;;1;|x;;1;|f3;;0;|f4;;1;|f5;;1;

how can I change to

a|b|c|d|3|f;f2;f3;
a|b|c|d|5|m;x;f3;f4;f5;

Basically I need to starting from 6th column to the end of line, delete ";1;|" or ";0;|"

Thanks again for your help.

Regards

Sandeep

5 
sed -e "s/;[^|][^|]*//g" -e "s/|/;/g" -e "s/\([^;]*\);\([^;]*\);\([^;]*\);\([^;]*\);\([^;]*\);/\1|\2|\3|\4|\5|/" <file>
6

A shorter one:

sed -e 's/;[0-9].//g' -e 's/;|/;/g'

Cheers

7

Compliments, smart use of the double ";"