Re: Full Name help

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