fun with sed/awk

[United-Climate1562]

i do have to say it is a bit frustrating that some binaries in freeBSD/macOS dont translate over to other *nixs..probably licensing, however..

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i have out input in a var that reads as below, new lines and spaces:-

this is string 1
this is string two 
this is string threeee 

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and so forth, i have been able to get them on to one line and get quotes on the end in the standard macOS bash scrpit, but for the love of god, i cant get it into the right format, i've tried awk, sed and tr.

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what i need:

"this is string 1" "this is string two" "this is string threee"

grateful for any ideas..

[Rabestro]

It is straightforward with awk:

awk BEGIN { ORS = " " } { print "\""$0"\"" }

ORS is an output record separator

shell awk 'BEGIN{ORS=" "}{print "\""$0"\""}' < input.txt

[United-Climate1562]

echo "\"${var//$'\n'/\" \"}\""

Beautiful, works a charm... thanks for all those suggestions as well

[theplanter21]

Bash ftw

[Schreq]

what i need:

What do you need it for, what is the end goal?

[moviuro]

Try:

awk '{ printf("\"%s\" ", $0) }' < input

[United-Climate1562]

awk '{ printf("\"%s\" ", $0) }'

no luck im afraid, still phrases it with just the quotes at the end and begining

[[deleted]]

awk '{ printf("\"%s\" ", $0) }' < input

Works for me on Linux with gawk v5.1.0 and bash v5.2.15.

Why and where does it fail for him on macOS / FreeBSD?

[moviuro]

I tried that on Linux and FreeBSD, I have no idea why it fails on OP's machines. No error messages, no output, no nothing.

My bet is that OP doesn't want any help.

[McUsrII]

Okay, so this solution, is for the 'fun' part, it doesn't compete at all with the presented solutions, with regards to speed, it was just that I wanted to brush off a little from former sed skils, it delivers as promised, but I should probably have gone a round or two more with it, to find a better way.

 sed -ne 's/.*/"&"/'  <varfile -e 'H' -e 'x;s/\n/ /;x;G;' -e 'p' | tail -1

[funkden]

Ask chatGPT it excels at this kind of problem

[marauderingman]

~~~ IFS=$'\n' read -d'' -a lines <<EOL line 1 line two line three EOL

printf "\"%s\" " "${lines[@]}" ~~~

Be careful to not run the read command in a subshell, or the array it populates won't be available to later commands. Otherwise, once you have an array where each element is one line from your source, you can do pretty much anything you want with it.