On Tue, 6 Jan 2004 12:50, Gautam Gopalakrishnan wrote: > On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 12:30:42PM +1030, Malcolm Kay wrote: > > On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 22:19, Zhang Weiwu wrote: > > > Hello. I've worked an hour to figure out a serial of sed command to > > > process some text (without any luck, you kown I'm kinda newbie). I > > > really appreciate your help. > > > > > > The original text file is in this form -- for each line: > > > one Chinese word then one or two English word seperated by space. > > > > > > I tried to do things like s/\(.*\)\([a-z]*\)/\2 \1/ but the first > > > \(.*\) is too greedy and included the rest [a-z]. > > > > Well the greedy part is easily fixed with: > > s/\([^a-z]*\)\([a-z]*\)/\2 \1/ > > > > But this will not work for those lines with 2 english words. The > > following should: % sed -n -e 's/\([^a-z]*\)\([a-z]*\) .*/\2 \1/p' -e > > 's/\([^a-z]*\)[a-z]* \([a-z]*\)/\2 \1/p' original > target > > I think awk is easier: > > awk '{print $2 " " $3 " " $1}' original | tr -s > target
I'm not really very familiar with awk, but I must say this is a much simpler and rather magical solution. How does awk know which part of the original line goes into $1, $2 and $3. (You will notice there is no space between the chinese and english words). I am also mystified how it generates two lines a ???? av ???? from the input ????a av Malcolm Kay _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"