Replace semicolon within double quotes in a file with semicolon delimiter

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello Team,

Could you please help me with the below question?
I have a file with the following properties

1) File Delimiter is ;
2) Text columns are within double quotes
3) Numeric columns will not have double quotes
4) File has total 6 columns

Please see a sample record from file

"TRP";037;5;"EDA";"Paper and Paperboard";"""for production; not including office supplies.  Pulp molded"

Here the last column has a semicolon in between. As a result my script is not reading the file correctly.
Do we have a way to replace the semicolon with space?

Regards
Sam

2

Please use code tags as required by forum rules!

This problem has been solved several times before. Are you sure you searched theses fora? However, try

awk -F\" '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i+=2) gsub (/;/, " ", $i)} 1' OFS=\" file
"TRP";037;5;"EDA";"Paper and Paperboard";"""for production  not including office supplies. Pulp molded"
1 Like
3

awk split

awk '{split($0,t,";");print t[1] ";" t[2] ";" t[3] ";" t[4] ";" t[5] ";" t[6] t[7]}' file
4

Thank you Looney.

Guess I missed to mention point. The number of columns can change each time for a file. It can 6 today and 8 tomorrow...Sorry about that