[Techtalk] text parsing question

[Conor Daly]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 10:27:32AM -0700 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
gossamer axe thought:
> Hi!
> 
> I have a text file that looks like
> ,
> question
> ,answer
> ,question2
> ,answer2
> ,

This file looks inconsistent from here.  Is it the case that there is no
comma on a line by itself between ,answer and ,question2 ?  If so you have
a harder task.  If there is always a comma by itself on a line, you have a
suitable separator. 

> So either making the text file automatically bring up two bottom lines to
> the first or someway of importing newline delimited fields into mysql.  I
> suppose a bash script to read each line in and maybe write it to a file
> $var1,$var2,$var3 on one line.

This would be my approach, not from any innate superiority of the method,
more from a lack of sed knowledge.  My bash script would do something
like:

exec < file

read LINE

echo $LINE | grep '^,$' > /dev/null

if [ $? .eq 0 ]; then
read LINE2
read LINE3
echo "$LINE $LINE2 $LINE3" > outfile
fi

and something to iterate over the file...

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at cod.homelinux.org>
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