Hi everyone,

If someone out there could help me out with this problem. I would really appreciate it.

I am trying to convert a file into xml format using Unix shell scripts.

The file has fields with each field having a certain number of bytes, but the fields are not delimited by anything (e.g. whitespace). I need to get those fields into some sort of data structure so that I can use them to generate the XML using a simple for loop. The following is a an example of what I am looking at:

Jack Johnson 90980288Harv 9090998
Joe Joie 8989 Sed 99488


I can't use whitespace as a delimiter.


Thanks you guys very much,
I really appreciate it.

Does this mean that each field has the same length?
For example: Field1=length(30), filed2=length(10), field3=length(24),...etc...

Yes. That is correct.

Try something like this:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
cat - <<! >data.txt
Jack Johnson        2005-02-11Harv      9090998
Joe Joie            2005-01-23Sed       0099488
!
awk ' BEGIN {print "<?xmlversion=""1.0""?>";print "<ROWSET>"}
{print "<ROW>"
 print "<NAME>" substr($0,1,20) "</NAME>"
 print "<TRN_DATE>" substr($0,21,10) "</TRN_DATE>"
 print "<TEXT>" substr($0,31,10) "</TEXT>"
 print "<ID>" substr($0,41,7) "</ID>"
 print "</ROW>";}
 END { print "</ROWSET>";}' data.txt >data.xml

Thanks very much LKBrwn. It worked.

Now, how I strip out the leading and trailing whitespace from the each string before having it print out?

I was thinking of using the split function to store it into an array and then printing those elements as one string, but that seems to be overkill.


Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Laud

as posted somewhere else....

Oh yes!