sorting

[phoebekong]

Hi all,

Does anyone can help me the following question?
In the following input file, each number in "start" is paired with numbers in column "end".


No StartEnd
A 22,222,33,22,1233,3232,44 555,333,222,55,1235,3235,66
B 33,333,22,44 66,340,44,55
C 66,55,555 75,58,560

For each row, I would like to sort those pair of number by "start" then by "end".
For example, the first row has 7 pairs of numbers, they are in the following order,
22,555
222,333
33,222
22,55
1233,1235
3232,3235
44,66
After sorting, they should be in the following order

22,55
22,555
33,222
44,66
222,333
1233,1235
3232,3235

In the end the the output after being sorted is follow,

No Start End
A 22,22,33,44,222,1233,3232 55,555,222,66,333,1235,3235
B 22,33,44,333 44,66,55,340
C 55,66,555 58,75,560



Your advice is much appreciated.

Thanks,
Phoebe

[linsuain]

From what you wrote it seems like you just need to replace a space character with a couple of end-of-line characters and perhaps some tabs. Did I miss the point?

I did not notice where you were sorting. Did you try using a sed command?

Otto.

[phoebekong]

sorry, I modified my question, hope it is clearer now.

[twoHats]

Your question needs to be clearer - not many will reverse engineer your question to help you. You may need to use a code tag so that formatting of columns etc won't get lost?

[chaosless]

the awk script below will separate your file and uses the sort utility for numeric sorting. numeric sort inside of awk is bit of a pain.

simplest way to run it is if you save the awk script as pairs.awk and your input file is pairs.txt then:

awk -f pairs.awk pairs.txt

{ pairs[$1]=$2 " " $3; }
END {
  n = asorti(pairs,ids);
  for (i=1; i<=n; i++) {
    id=ids[i];
    split(pairs[id],set);
    printf("%s [%s] [%s]\n",id,set[1],set[2]);
    nidx=split(set[1],idx,",");
    split(set[1],seta,",");
    split(set[2],setb,",");
    cmd="sort -n ";
    for(j=1; j<=nidx; j++) {
      printf("%s %s\n",seta[j],setb[j]) | cmd;
    }
    close(cmd);
  }
}

[chaosless]

this will let you read back in the sorted results if you needed to do further processing:

{ pairs[$1]=$2 " " $3; }
END {
  n = asorti(pairs,ids);
  for (i=1; i<=n; i++) {
    id=ids[i];
    split(pairs[id],set);
    printf("%s [%s] [%s]\n",id,set[1],set[2]);
    nidx=split(set[1],idx,",");
    split(set[1],seta,",");
    split(set[2],setb,",");
    cmd="sort -n ";
    for(j=1; j<=nidx; j++) {
      printf("%s %s\n",seta[j],setb[j]) |& cmd;
    }
    close(cmd, "to");
    while ((cmd |& getline line) > 0) {
      split(line,pair);
      printf("%s,%s\n", pair[1], pair[2]);
    }
    close(cmd)
  }
}