how to protect white space in for loop

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi All,

I know there's a really simple answer to this but I just can't think of it :slight_smile:

I'm processing a file which has lines containing white space i.e.

And I want to perform some awk on each line but when I do the following:

for US in $( cat /tmp/unique-strings.tmp | sed 's/\[/\\[/g' | sed 's/\]/\\]/g' | sed 's/\//\\\//g' )
do

echo ""
echo "$US"
echo ""

done

Each line gets broken down into it's component parts like this:

How can I get it to echo each complete line? (In my code I obviously want to do more than just echo the line...)

Thanks,

p.

2

Sorry I don't get it. Please just show the input file and how the output should look like. If you work each element with for from a list, every element will be echoed line by line, that's as it is. In the example you use sed, not awk :smiley:

3

Something like this?

awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){printf("%s\n\n", $i)}}' file

Regards

4

Sorry, I'm not explaining myself clearly.

I would like the entire sentence to be treated as one string but it's getting split into component parts (each word).

Is there a way I can stop this split occuring?

5

Don't beat me, but you could just "cat" the file and everything will be fine hehe :wink:
But I guess you will do something with every sentence... I would prefer this

cat infile |\
while read LINE; do
    echo "This is my line:" ${LINE}
    #now do something with it in here
done

If you are going to parse the contents of the line, better use awk or sed like Franklin52 did.

6 
while read record
do
echo "$record" | sed 's/\[/\\[/g' | sed 's/\]/\\]/g' | sed 's/\//\\\//g'| read US
echo ""
echo "$US"
echo ""

done < /tmp/unique-strings.tmp
7

Brilliant that's what I needed thanks :slight_smile:

Believe it or not it's the first time I've used a while statement in one of my scripts! :slight_smile: