Turning multi-line string into single comma-separated

Question

Clean and simple:

awk '{print $2}' file.txt | paste -s -d, -

You can use awk and sed:

awk -vORS=, '{ print $2 }' file.txt | sed 's/,$/\n/'

Or if you want to use a pipe:

echo "data" | awk -vORS=, '{ print $2 }' | sed 's/,$/\n/'

To break it down:

• awk is great at handling data broken down into fields
• -vORS=, sets the "output record separator" to ,, which is what you wanted
• { print $2 } tells awk to print the second field for every record (line)
• file.txt is your filename
• sed just gets rid of the trailing , and turns it into a newline (if you want no newline, you can do s/,$//)

cat data.txt | xargs | sed -e 's/ /, /g'

This might work for you:

cut -d' ' -f5 file | paste -d',' -s
+12.0,+15.5,+9.0,+13.5

or

sed '/^.*\(+[^ ]*\).*/{s//\1/;H};${x;s/\n/,/g;s/.//p};d' file
+12.0,+15.5,+9.0,+13.5

or

sed 's/\S\+\s\+//;s/\s.*//;H;$!d;x;s/.//;s/\n/,/g' file

For each line in the file; chop off the first field and spaces following, chop off the remainder of the line following the second field and append to the hold space. Delete all lines except the last where we swap to the hold space and after deleting the introduced newline at the start, convert all newlines to ,'s.

N.B. Could be written:

sed 's/\S\+\s\+//;s/\s.*//;1h;1!H;$!d;x;s/\n/,/g' file

$ awk -v ORS=, '{print $2}' data.txt | sed 's/,$//'
+12.0,+15.5,+9.0,+13.5

---

$ cat data.txt | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | tr '\n' ',' | sed 's/,$//'
+12.0,+15.5,+9.0,+13.5

awk one liner

$ awk '{printf (NR>1?",":"") $2}' file

+12.0,+15.5,+9.0,+13.5

This should work too

awk '{print $2}' file | sed ':a;{N;s/\n/,/};ba'