sort words in a line

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi
Im looking for a way, hopefully a one-liner to sort words in a line

e.g

"these are the words in a line"
to
"a are in line the these words"

Thanks!

2

perl -e '{$_="these are the words in a line"; s/(.) (.) (.) (.) (.) (.) (.*)/$6 $2 $5 $7 $3 $1 $4/; print}'

3 
> echo "these are the words in a line" | tr " " "\n" | sort | tr "\n" " " ;echo
a are in line the these words

That last echo command is to simply force a new line.

4

nice one. although my line will have more than 9 terms, seperated by commas

e.g
csoTopic=Topics: Artists Exact Match, queryTerm=new kids on the block, defaultDisplayName=New Kids On The Block, topic=vid
eos, artistName=New Kids On The Block, weight=50,

I think Im gonna have to go down the road of splitting them in a temp file , ordering them, and joining them up again.

edited... this was in response to jimmy_y's fine perl skills.

5

echo "these are the words in a line"|awk -F- '{print $6 $2 $5 $7 $3 $1 $4}'

echo "these are the words in a line"|sed 's/\(.\) \(.\) \(.\) \(.\) \(.\) \(.\) \(.*\)/\6 \2 \5 \7 \3 \1 \4/g'

from

6

I thought the OP wanted to sort the fields - not simply manually rearrange them!

7

:eek: Did not realize he wants to sort instead of manual arrange.

8

that's what the title said :wink:

9 
$
$ echo "these are the words in a line"|perl -ne '@x=split/\s/; print join " ",sort @x'
a are in line the these words$
$

$
$ echo "csoTopic=Topics: Artists Exact Match, queryTerm=new kids on the block, defaultDisplayName=New Kids On The Block, topic=videos, artistName=New Kids On The Block, weight=50,"|perl -ne '@x=split/,\s*/; print join ", ",sort @x'
artistName=New Kids On The Block, csoTopic=Topics: Artists Exact Match, defaultDisplayName=New Kids On The Block, queryTerm=new kids on the block, topic=videos, weight=50$
$

tyler_durden

10

perl:

my @arr=split(" ", "these are the words in a line");
$,=" ";
print sort @arr;
11

You may consider this...

echo "these are the words in a line" | awk -v RS=' ' -v ORS="\n" '{print}' | sort | xargs
12

GNU awk

awk 'BEGIN{
  w = "these are the ,words in a . line"
  gsub(/[[:punct:]]|  +/,"",w)
  m=split(w,words," ")
  b=asort(words, dest)
  for(i=1;i<=b;i++) printf dest" "
}'
13

Thanks Joey, it worked like a dream

I split on the comma like this
echo $line | tr "," "\n" | sort | tr "\n" " "

Would there be a way to move one of the terms to the top of the list after sorting.

e.g. I always want the e parameter (e=5) to be at the top of the list.
before
d=4,e=5,a=1,b=2,c=3,f=6
after
e=5,a=1,b=2,c=3,d=4,f=6

14

if your $line has punctuations, it will not work

# echo "one two ,three four,five"  | tr "," "\n" | sort | tr "\n" " "
15

I think it will be ok for me. I really only want to split by comma and then sort alpahbetically

between each comma are name value pairs and I only care about the first letter in the name.

16

Hi.

If you use Linux, there is a handy utility msort that can be used -- it allows one to specify the record separator:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# @(#) s4	Demonstrate sort on words in string with msort.

echo
set +o nounset
LC_ALL=C ; LANG=C ; export LC_ALL LANG
echo "Environment: LC_ALL = $LC_ALL, LANG = $LANG"
echo "(Versions displayed with local utility \"version\")"
version >/dev/null 2>&1 && version "=o" $(_eat $0 $1) msort
set -o nounset

IN="these are the words in a string"
echo
echo " Input data line (colons as markers):"
echo ":$IN:"

echo
echo " Results:"
OUT=$( echo -n "$IN" | msort -q -n 1,1 -r " " )
echo ":$OUT:"

echo
echo " Input with comma separator:"
IN="queryTerm=new kids on the block,defaultDisplayName=New Kids On The Block,"
echo ":$IN:"
echo
echo " Results:"
OUT=$( echo -n "$IN" | msort -q -n 1,1 -r "," )
echo ":$OUT:"
exit 0

Producing:

% ./s4

Environment: LC_ALL = C, LANG = C
(Versions displayed with local utility "version")
OS, ker|rel, machine: Linux, 2.6.26-2-amd64, x86_64
Distribution        : Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 
GNU bash 3.2.39
msort - ( /usr/bin/msort Apr 24 2008 )

 Input data line (colons as markers):
:these are the words in a string:

 Results:
:a are in string the these words :

 Input with comma separator:
:queryTerm=new kids on the block,defaultDisplayName=New Kids On The Block,:

 Results:
:defaultDisplayName=New Kids On The Block,queryTerm=new kids on the block,:

Best wishes ... cheers, drl