Convert delimited file to fixed width in Linux

Question

Using tools available to bash, how do I convert delimited data

foo|bbbaaarrr|bazz

to fixed width data

foo      bbbaaarrrbazz     EOL   

I tried using column as the documentation implied I could define the column width, didn't work. I'm sure this is trivial using sed or awk, but I'm not familiar with them.

Answer 1

The following should work for you:

column -t -s '|' input_file_here

It will convert the input file to table format. The input record separator is specified by -s. If you want something other than space padding in the fields, use -o to set the output separator. The output separator defaults to two spaces, so there will be two spaces between each column in the output.

Example:

$ cat input
hello|world|testing
a|b|c
another|test|line

$ column -t -s '|' input
hello    world  testing
a        b      c
another  test   line

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/column.1.html

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Edit:

If you need each field to be a fixed length, you can use awk for that. You'll need to set the input delimiter for your file, but something like this should work:

$ awk -F '|' '{ for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) { printf("%-10s", $i); } print ""; }' input
hello     world     testing
a         b         c
another   test      line

Just change the field width specified in the printf statement.