Text formating.

[usblackhawk]

i have a file with data in that looks something like this:

Code:
7 213.105.172.13 64.139 ms 51.771 ms 51.922 ms
8 62.253.184.2 52.075 ms 52.214 ms 55.384 ms
9 193.159.225.237 49.361 ms 52.573 ms 52.688 ms
10 217.239.40.173 64.264 ms 64.204 ms 64.795 ms
11 217.6.48.246 64.797 ms 64.983 ms 65.299 ms
12 194.126.123.58 77.388 ms 77.950 ms 82.695 ms
13 194.126.123.53 114.337 ms 126.156 ms 122.287 ms
14 194.126.123.46 123.318 ms 144.008 ms 141.843 ms
15 195.250.170.38 142.046 ms 130.792 ms 128.414 ms
How do i go about making sure that they align up correctly column by column? so that it is easier to read on the eye..
or if possible, would it be able to export to a openoffice spreadsheet with all data correctly in each shell....

thanks.

[Cabhan]

If you converted it to CSV (comma-separated-value; by going in and using quotes to indicate what a field is, and using commas to separate fields (outside the quotes)), I am rather certain that you could import a CSV document into an OpenOffice spreadsheet. Alternatively, you could write a script to align them in columns in plain text.

Both of these could be done in a script. You know what each column looks like, so I think that I would write a regular expression that captures the data from each line and puts each piece into the correct variable. You could then either use printf to format the output in plain text, or print out a CSV document.

[usblackhawk]

If you converted it to CSV (comma-separated-value; by going in and using quotes to indicate what a field is, and using commas to separate fields (outside the quotes)), I am rather certain that you could import a CSV document into an OpenOffice spreadsheet. Alternatively, you could write a script to align them in columns in plain text.

Both of these could be done in a script. You know what each column looks like, so I think that I would write a regular expression that captures the data from each line and puts each piece into the correct variable. You could then either use printf to format the output in plain text, or print out a CSV document.

so say i wanted to make a small script, i would write an expression for it and output that to another file..

but how would i write the expression.. with quotes?

i.e

"number" , "ip", "time/ms", "time/ms", "time/ms"

is that how? but then how would it differentiate between numbers and text?

[scm]

If you really just want to pretty-print the data the simplest way would be something like:

cat datafile | while read x ip t1 u1 t2 u2 t3 u3
do
    printf "%3s  %-16s  %10s%s %10s%s %10s%s\n" $x $ip $t1 $u1 $t2 $u2 $t3 $u3
done

Adjust the spacing to suit and you're done!

[ghostdog74]

here's one way

awk '
{ 
    printf "%-3s" ,$1
    printf "%-15s" ,$2
    printf "%10s" ,$3
    print ""
}' "file"

output:

 # ./test.sh
7  213.105.172.13     64.139
8  62.253.184.2       52.075
9  193.159.225.237    49.361
10 217.239.40.173     64.264
11 217.6.48.246       64.797
12 194.126.123.58     77.388
13 194.126.123.53    114.337
14 194.126.123.46    123.318
15 195.250.170.38    142.046

[usblackhawk]

thanks for your replies! for some reason awk didnt work for me.. but cat did, so am using that

thanks again!

[Cabhan]

Just for completeness, the approach I was suggesting is something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

open my $in, "< datafile" or die "$0: Cannot open datafile for input!\n";

while(<$in>)
{
    my($num, $ip, $time1, $time2, $time3) = /^(\d+)\s+([\d.]+)\s+([\d.]+) ms\s+([\d.]+) ms\s+([\d.]+) ms$/;
    # do whatever you want with these values
}

I am a big fan of the power of regular expressions, and while this one could be more precise, it would be good as long as the data was sane. I like this because rather than just splitting on whitespace, it allows you to specify exactly what fields you want and what they look like.

But hey, whatever works.