Re: Importing lines of variable length from ASCII

In response to Louis Becker :
> Hi
>
>
>
> I have an ASCII file that I try to import via the COPY command. The ASCII file
> is pipe delimited. Some lines in the file have no value in the last field and
> because there is no value in the last field, it also omits the last delimiter.
> It therefore seems that some lines have 11 columns while some other lines have
> 10 columns although these 10 columns correspond with the first 10 columns of
> lines that contain 11 columns. The omission of the last delimiter apparently is
> an accordance with the CSV files standard.
>
>
>
> Apart from editing the ASCII files, is there a way to import these files that
> contain lines of variable length?

Pipe your file through a filter like my example below:

kretschmer(at)tux:~$ cat file.txt
foo|bar|1|batz
bar|bla|2
this|is|3|line
kretschmer(at)tux:~$ cat file.txt | awk '{cols=split($0,a,"|"); if (cols==4) print $0; else printf ("%s|\n",$0)}'
foo|bar|1|batz
bar|bla|2|
this|is|3|line
kretschmer(at)tux:~$

Regards, Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
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