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I have multiple Key:Value pair data blocks separated by delimiter "*************" in an text file.The help required here is for a shell script to convert them into csv file.

*************
Name : Anderson 
Age : 32 
Country : U.S
*************
Name : Pramod 
Country : U.K
*************
Country : Africa 
Sport : Football
*************

The Output should be the csv file with below format OutPut :

Name,Age,Country,Sport
Anderson,32,U.S.A,
Pramod,,U.K,
,,Aftica,Football

This is kind of similar to rec2csv conversion from GNU recutils , but this I want it to get done by Shell Scripting

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  • The Key:Value pairs are delimited by newline in same dataset. Commented Dec 3, 2015 at 18:40

1 Answer 1

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1

You can use awk for this conversion:

$ awk -F' : ' 'BEGIN { print "Name,Age,Country,Sport"; OFS="," }
    /^\*+$/ && NR>1 { print a["Name"], a["Age"], a["Country"], a["Sport"];
                      delete a; next}
    { a[$1]=$2} ' file.rec

Where : is used as input field seperator, , is set as output field seperator, the associative array a is used to temporarily store the values, the regular expresion ^\*+$ is used to recognize the record separating lines, a complete record is only printed after the second separating line (i.e. if number of records are greater than 1) and after each record the array is cleared.

The variables $1 and $2 reference the key and value in the input. The next statement directly advances the processing to the next line.

Not existing keys in the associative array result in empty strings - which matches the question.

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  • Thanks Maxschlepzig for the the solution , it worked as expected. Commented Dec 6, 2015 at 5:11

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