[ILUG] joining columns/removing commas in a CSV file?

[kevin lyda]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 11:32:34AM -0000, Gary McCloskey wrote:
> big CSV file, need to merge particular columns. 
> => removing particular commas, e.g. to join the 4th,5th, 6th and 7th columns, remove the 4th, 5th, 6th commas
> 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 => 1,2,3,4567,8,9
> 
> thought that tr, cut or paste might help : just gave me a headache

does this make the headache go away:

perl -pe '/((?:.*?,){3})(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*)/;$_="$1$2$3$4$5\n"'

i miss my computational theory course.  of course, what i really
wanted was:

perl -pe '/((?:.*?,){3})(?:(.*?),){3}(.*)/;$_="$1$2$3$4$5\n"'

but the references don't work like that.  perhaps i'm missing something.

kevin

ps  no, in the past week of beating my head against modems, not a bit of
    modem spew has actually been a valid perl program...

-- 
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fork()'ed on 37058400    a: when batman fought the penguin, he won.
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