Do you want to build by row or by column? Building by row is easy. It's
not much use for cases where you need to keep changing the number of
columns, but I use a search and replace process to convert single
columns into tab-delimited tables ordered by row using these strings
(this is for five columns):
Find: (.*)\r(.*)\r(.*)\r(.*)\r(.*)\r
Replace With: \1\t\2\t\3\t\4\t\5\r
This works for lists of several thousand lines - in fact, for arbitrary
length lists, and for situations where the need is common but only
involves a limited number of columns I'd just save each version as a
pattern.
Building by column - which is what you show below - is more difficult,
particularly if you want to print the result - do you break at the
bottom of the page (how many lines per page?), or keep on going until
you have exhausted the list? If you are going to exhaust the list, then
for arbitrary length lists I think you need temporary files to build
stacks of entries from which you subsequently pick off entries to build
your final columnated (is that a word?) file. Sounds like a PITA, but
scriptable if necessary - but I'd avoid it if at all possible and push
for the 'by row' approach.
On Wed, 17 May 2006 2:44:45 PM PST Arthur Knapp wrote:
Yeah, I actually need something like this:
apple
banana
pear
peach
Turned into something like this:
apple pear
banana peach
Some call it laziness: I call it 'efficient allocation of resources'
Peter Tattersall
http://www.zerobyzero.ca/Weathertop/
http://www.zerobyzero.ca/Starstruck/
L'Osservatore Ponte di Legno
43 49 N 79 34 W
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