join - using *only* tab as a field separator

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have files with tabs separating the fields but those fields values can have whitespace characters (basically a text string). I want to instruct join to not consider white spaces as separators but only tabs.

I have tried:
join -t "<Tab>" file1 file2
join -t "<tab>" file1 file2
join -t "\t" file1 file2

2

kindly submit some input texts and the desired output text
BR

3

can't do tabs on forums but here:

file1
abc def <Tab> X1
ghi jkl <Tab> X2

file2
abc def <Tab> Y1
ghi jkl <Tab> Y2

output
abc def <Tab> X1 <Tab> Y1
ghi jkl <Tab> X2 <Tab> Y2

4 
use this code:-

nawk  '
NR==FNR {
a[$1$2]=$3 ; next
}

{ print s=( $1$2 in a ) ? $1FS$2FS"\t"FS$3FS"\t"FS a[$1$2] :  $0 RS }

'  file2 file1

note:- if you don't have nawk use /usr/xpg4/bin/awk

BR
5

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6 
thanks Mr. vgersh99 for the advice..hope you can understand the code now after modification :)
7

It seems to me the solution you propose would only work if there is only 1 space in the first expression but wouldn't if it had multiple (ie "a b cdef"). Anyways, I tried a solution of my own, which isn't that pretty, but works.

  1. substitute spaces to @@@
  2. substitute tab to space
  3. join
  4. revert space to tab
  5. revert @@@ to space
sed -e 's/ /@@@/g' ./temp/file1 | sed -e 's/<tab>/ /g' > ./temp/file1.rdy2join

sed -e 's/ /@@@/g' ./temp/file2 | sed -e 's/<tab>/ /g' > ./temp/file2.rdy2join

join -t " " -1 1 -2 1 ./temp/file1.rdy2join ./temp/file2.rdy2join > ./temp/output

then I reverted with sed again.
8 
It will work only you need to change the fields numbers in the assoiative array to be :-

a[$1$2$3]=$4 .... and thats it.

try it...

BR :)