Can I do a 'sort lines...' based on how many times a particular character
appears in the line?
Not directly.
I have several files of street addresses that will eventually end up in a
single csv. Some lines have more separating commas than others and I'd like
to sort each file according to how many commas appear in a line.
Even better would be to use just the commas that appear after the final \ as
in the example below:
CD 6\C\Company, Unit 2 Little Place, Clarke Road N10\Company, Unit 2 ,Little
Place, Clarke Road ,N10
CD 8\L\Flat C, 64 Lime Road N11\Flat C, 64 ,Lime Road ,N11
CD 7\B\Broad Street N6\Broad Street ,N6
I suggest you first translate the file to start with <count of
commas><tab>, then sort numerically, then remote the leading count.
Adding the count of the number of commands after the last \ is done
with perl like this:
perl -i.bak -n -e 'm/.*\\(.*)/; print $1 =~ tr/,/,/, "\t", $_;' file.txt
Broken down, it means:
-i - read and then write that input file
-i.bak - saving a backup copy with extension .bak
-n reading each line but not printing anything
-e with script that follows
m/.*\\(.*)/ find everything after the last \
print print the following
$1 =~ tr/,/,/ - translate in $1 every comma to a comma, returning the number
"\t" tab
$_ the line, including trailing linefeed (make sure your file is
linefeed line endings)
file.txt the name of the input/output file
becomes
CD 7\B\Broad Street N6\Broad Street ,N6
CD 8\L\Flat C, 64 Lime Road N11\Flat C, 64 ,Lime Road ,N11
CD 6\C\Company, Unit 2 Little Place, Clarke Road N10\Company, Unit 2 ,Little
Place, Clarke Road ,N10
Becomes:
2 CD 6\C\Company, Unit 2 Little Place, Clarke Road N10\Company,
Unit 2 ,Little
2 Place, Clarke Road ,N10
3 CD 8\L\Flat C, 64 Lime Road N11\Flat C, 64 ,Lime Road ,N11
1 CD 7\B\Broad Street N6\Broad Street ,N6
Then sort numerically (sort -n or use BBEdit)
Then remove the leading <number><tab> (left as an exercise).
Enjoy,
Peter.
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