I have been trying to solve a problem for hours and haven’t found a solution. I am trying to reformat a text file that has been incorrectly parsed. The file format contains a list of names, starting with the last name first, and has a troublesome sole first name on one of the rows as below:
Mussen, Steven Fletcher, Bob Monday, Mario Glitch, Christopher Fletcher, Bob Ram, Dale Ram, Dale Mussen, Steven Von Hemie, Donnie Gallape, Patrick Desormore, J. Sun, Dallas Sun, Dallas
I have tried dumping the file into a bash array by doing:
declare -a GAMERS=($(cat Gamers.txt))"
then running a for-loop:
for i in "${GAMERS[@]}";do echo $i >>NewGamers.txt; done;
which gives me one word per a line. I then tried using awk to combine every two rows into one with:
awk 'NR%2{printf $0" ";next;}1' NewGamers.txt
The problem is Mr. Donnie Von Hemie has three strings in his name and makes my awk solution useless. The end goal is to simply solve bad formatting, in this case I am trying to move the sole Dale up a row. The end output should be:
Mussen, Steven Fletcher, Bob Monday, Mario Glitch, Christopher Fletcher, Bob Ram, Dale Ram, Dale Mussen, Steven Von Hemie, Donnie Gallape, Patrick Desormore, J. Sun, Dallas Sun, Dallas
Any ideas would be hella appreciated…
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Answer
You can keep it simple and use awk:
awk -F ' *, *' '!$2{if (!p) p=$0; else { print p, $0; p=""} next} 1' file
Mussen, Steven
Fletcher, Bob
Monday, Mario
Glitch, Christopher
Fletcher, Bob
Ram, Dale
Ram, Dale
Mussen, Steven
Von Hemie, Donnie
Gallape, Patrick
Desormore, J.
Sun, Dallas
Sun, Dallas