Strip time from CSV File?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I've been trying (and failing miserably) all morning to strip from a CSV file the time from it.
Can somebody point me in the right direction on how to do this using sed or awk?
The file looks like:

"James","07/20/2009-14:40:11"
"Steve","08/06/2006-02:34:37"
"John","11/03/2008-12:12:34"

and i want to strip it to make it look like:

"James","07/20/2009"
"Steve","08/06/2006"
"John","11/03/2008"

using cut -d '-' -f 1 < file is not an option since some names may contain dashes....

Thanks a lot in advance for your help.

2

Possibilities, with sed:

sed 's/\(.*\)-.*/\1"/' file

with awk:

awk -F, '{sub("-.*","\"",$NF)}1' OFS="," file

Regards

3

@Franklin52: how does the regex in the sed command skip dashes in the name? and what does the \1" do? Thanks in advance

4

sed has a greedy pattern match, so it should match the last dash.

With sed you can save substrings with \(.*\) and recall them back with \1, \2, \3 etc. with:

/\(.*\)-.*/

we saved a substring \(.*\) before the last dash, and with:

\1"/

we print a double quote " after the substring \1.

Hope this helps.

5

Thank you so much Franklin!
This is just what i was looking for !

Thanks!!!!

6

Thanks for the explanation.