[ale] sed help

[Thomas Stromberg]

On 27 jan 2006, at 23.31, Robert Coggins wrote:

> OK all I hate asking questions like this on here but here we go.
>
> I have a series of files. In each of the files there are many lines  
> that
> only have ,,,,, on them.  For every line I find in these files I  
> want to
> bring the previous line, the ,,,,, line and the next line together.

I'm sure there are shorter solutions, but this was the first answer I  
came up with that seemed to work properly. Pop this into a file named  
fixme.rb. This assumes you have ruby installed, which Mac OS X and  
many Linux distributions seem to.. otherwise, type "yum install ruby"  
or "apt-get install ruby" yadda yadda yadda. See the comments for  
example syntax.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# Quick hack to append lines separated by a ,,,, line
#
# format:
# cat /tmp/brokefile.txt | ruby ./fixme.rb > newoutput.txt

data=$stdin.readlines
trail=nil

while line=data.shift
     if line
         line.chomp!
         if line =~ /^,+$/
             print line + data.shift
             trail=nil
         else
             if trail
                 print "\n"
             end
             print line
             trail=1
         end
     end
end

# if we neglected the previous newline, make one
if trail
     puts
end




// Thomas Str?mberg
// http://toadstool.se/
// +1 678 773 9475