sed or awk Replacement/Addition

UNIX for Beginners Q & A
1

Hi,

I have a big text file with similar data as below and need the text as in output
using awk or sed. any help is greatly appreciated.

Input:

City=Chicago Elden street 
 >>> reservedBy = business 1
 >>> reservedBy = business 2
 >>> reservedBy = business 3
City=Dallas Elm street 
 >>> reservedBy = business 1
 >>> reservedBy = business 2
 >>> reservedBy = business 3

Output:

City=Chicago Elden street
Chicago  >>> reservedBy = business 1
Chicago  >>> reservedBy = business 2
Chicago  >>> reservedBy = business 3
City=Dallas Elden street
Dallas  >>> reservedBy = business 1
Dallas  >>> reservedBy = business 2
Dallas  >>> reservedBy = business 3
2

Hello tech_frk,

Could you please try following and let me know if this helps you.

awk -F"[ =]" '/^City/{val=$2;print;next} {print val "\t" $0}'  Input_file

Thanks,
R. Singh

3

What if the city has more than one word like "New York" or "Los Angeles"?

4

Hello RudiC,

Good point :b:
Then for these kind of scenarios following may help on same then.

awk -F"[ =]" '/^City/{val="";for(i=2;i<=NF-3;i++){val=val?val OFS $i:$i};print;next} {print val "\t" $0;}'  Input_file

Thanks,
R. Singh

5

OK, solved. What if a street has three or more elements as "East New York Ave"?

The sample in post#1 has trailing spaces that don't help either.

6

Or, more general, what separates the Cities name from the street name?

Because this is one problem where the "Hold space" capability of sed can be shown here is a solution (for one-word-cities) in sed:

sed '/^City=/ {
             h
             s/^City=//
             s/ .*/ /
             x
             p
             d
          }
     G; s/\(.*\)\n\(.*\)/\2 \1/' inputfile

I hope this helps.

bakunin