Art S. Kagel wrote:
> Dave wrote:
Minor fixes to the AWK lines, forgot closing quotes and filenames and
backslash is not needed with single quotes. See below:

Art S. Kagel

>> So I'm importing a file into a temp table using DBLoad.
>>
>> This file though does not have the same format as the table it will
>> move into. It needs to be "Last, First M" but within the file it is
>> "First M Last". Not all people have middle initial as well, and if they
>> don't have a middle initial there are 2 spaces in between.
>>
>> The file is just a list of names,address,phone,etc.
>>
>> My boss and I decided to load it into the temp table and figure out how
>> to seperate the First, Last, and Middle initial into sepearate fields
>> and then move it into the appropriate table using an Informer but we're
>> not experienced with String parsing.
>>
>> Anyone got any tips? I can't imagine this is a new problem, but we've
>> never dealt with it. Thanks much.
>
>
> Dbload can do it for you. See the syntax for decoding a fixed format
> file in the Migration Guide. It's something like:
>
> FILE my_input
> (last 1-20,
> mi 22,
> first 24-40 );
>
> If the file is variable length, use UNIX tools to pad it out:

awk '
{
if (NF == 3) { printf "%20s %1s %20s\n", $1, $2, $3; }
else { printf "%20s %20s\n", $1, $2; }
}' input.file >output.file

> Or to convert it to delimited format:

awk '
{
if (NF == 3) { printf "%s|%s|%20s|\n", $1, $2, $3; }
else { printf "%s||%s|\n", $1, $2; }
}' input.file >output.delimitedfile

> More elegant solutions using Perl I'm sure, but it takes me a minute or
> two longer to write in Perl, so...
>
> Art S. Kagel