4

I have the following string

y10_zcis y10_nom y10_infl y20_zcis y20_infl y30_zcis

I would like to transform this to 

"y10_zcis", "y10_nom", "y10_infl", "y20_zcis", "y20_infl", "y30_zcis"

I accomplished something similar with the extremely ugly:

$ cat in.txt | sed 's/ /\'$'\n/g' | sed 's/\(.*\)/"\1",/g' | tr -d '\n' "y10_zcis","y10_nom","y10_infl","y20_zcis","y20_infl","y30_zcis",

But that feels like an utter failure, and it doesn't take care of the last unwanted , (but perhaps this is best to just delete afterwards)

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6 Answers 6

Reset to default
6

You can do 

sed -e 's| |", "|g' -e 's|^|"|g' -e 's|$|"|g' in.txt

Where

  • 's| |", "|g' will replace every space with ", "
  • 's|^|"|g' while at the beginning there's no space, you must specify with ^ the beginning of the line, so you're telling, put " at the beginning.
  • 's|$|"|g' same thing but specifying the end of every line with $

UPDATE

As @don_crissti pointed out, you can do it shorter with the following

sed 's| |", "|g;s|.*|"&"|'

Where

  • ; separate each instruction
  • .* matches the entire line.

  • & an ampersand on the RHS is replaced by the entire expression matched on the LHS, in this case .*

    RHS=Right hand side

    LHS=Left hand side

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2
  • Very nice, would you mind explaining how it works? Thanks Commented Mar 4, 2016 at 18:37
  • @luffe updated! Commented Mar 4, 2016 at 18:41
5

Perhaps awk

awk -vOFS=', ' '{for (k=1; k<=NF; ++k) $k="\""$k"\""; print}' file "y10_zcis", "y10_nom", "y10_infl", "y20_zcis", "y20_infl", "y30_zcis", "y30_nom", "y30_infl"
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3

You can do:

sed 's/\([^ ]\+\)/"\1",/g; s/,$//' file.txt

Example:

% sed 's/\([^ ]\+\)/"\1",/g; s/,$//' <<<'y10_zcis y10_nom y10_infl y20_zcis y20_infl y30_zcis' "y10_zcis", "y10_nom", "y10_infl", "y20_zcis", "y20_infl", "y30_zcis"
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2

Using Perl:

perl -lane '$,=", "; foreach(@F) {s/^|$/"/g; push(@f, $_)}; print(@f)' <<<'y10_zcis y10_nom y10_infl y20_zcis y20_infl y30_zcis'
  • $, = ", ": sets the output field separator to ,;
  • foreach(@F) {s/^|$/"/g; push(@f, $_)}: for each space-separated field, wraps the field into double quotes and appends it @f;
  • print(@f): prints the elements of @f separated by the output field separator.
% perl -lane '$,=", "; foreach(@F) {s/^|$/"/g; push(@f, $_)}; print(@f)' <<<'y10_zcis y10_nom y10_infl y20_zcis y20_infl y30_zcis' "y10_zcis", "y10_nom", "y10_infl", "y20_zcis", "y20_infl", "y30_zcis" %
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2

Assuming you're using bash and your string is already in a variable:

$ a="y10_zcis y10_nom y10_infl y20_zcis y20_infl y30_zcis" $

Then you can do this:

$ echo \"${a// /\", \"}\" "y10_zcis", "y10_nom", "y10_infl", "y20_zcis", "y20_infl", "y30_zcis" $
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1

Yet Another Way, using the shell (for, printf), and a final sed hack:

( for word in $(cat in.txt) do printf '"%s", ' $word; done; printf '"\n' ) | sed 's/, "$//'
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1
  • 2
    Avoid the for stuff in $(cat file) construct... besides, you're already using sed so use only sed for this job. If you wanted to do it shell only, you could run (with bash4): mapfile -t stuff <infile; printf '"%s"\n' "${stuff[@]// /\", \"}" Commented Mar 4, 2016 at 23:12

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