OT: sed problem

[Daniela]

On Sunday 01 February 2004 18:10, Chris Pressey wrote:
> On Sun, 1 Feb 2004 15:33:58 +0000
>
> Daniela <dgw at liwest.at> wrote:
> > On Sunday 01 February 2004 01:34, Jez Hancock wrote:
> > > On Sun, Feb 01, 2004 at 01:38:44AM +0000, Daniela wrote:
> > > > I was wondering how I can do the following with sed (or another
> > > > program): 1. Output only the text from the start of the line to
> > > > the first pipe character 2. Output only the text between the last
> > > > and the previous pipe character Or, split the line at the pipe
> > > > characters and assign the parts to different shell variables.
> > >
> > > #!/bin/sh
> > > test="one|two|three"
> > > set `echo "$test" | sed -e 's/\|/ /g'`
> > >
> > > # $1="one", $2="two", $3="three":
> > > echo $@
> >
> > This doesn't work when the parts between the pipe characters contain
> > spaces themselves.
>
> Nor does the awk approach I posted, incidentally - the problem being
> that sh likes to split up its input into variables, by spaces.

awk -F'|' '{ print $1 }'  does work indeed. This way, I can assign the parts 
to different variables, and dismiss the parts I don't need.

> You can work around it by translating the spaces into some unused
> character first, then translating pipes to spaces, then finally
> translating the unused characters back into spaces in each of the
> variables.
>
> There may be a simpler way, but if so, I don't know what it is.
>
> Or you could avoid sh variables and do whatever processing you have to
> do entirely in awk (or perl.)

I really like csh programming. Everyone says that csh is crap for scripting, 
but it isn't. I think Perl is harder than csh.
But let's not start another holy war.