How to make a new line in a text file at every instance of character X - Windows 7?

Question

I have a text file filled with characters:

ABCABCABCABC

...and with a script (Batch, VBS, Powershell, anything simple for Windows really) am trying to automatically add a new line for every instance of a certain character, in this case the letter A, so the output would then appear as such:

ABC
ABC
ABC
ABC

How can this be accomplished with any of the scripting tools I mentioned above?

Much appreciated, thanks a bunch!

mjolinor · Answer 1 · 2013-03-21T19:14:31.470

6

Powershell:

(get-content c:\somedir\inputfile.txt) -replace 'A',"`nA" | set-content c:\somedir\outputfile.txt

edited Mar 21 '13 at 19:14

answered Mar 21 '13 at 17:17

mjolinor

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Updated code to show example use for file processing. For very large files you may need to adjust that to use -readcount and a foreach-object loop to conserve memory. – mjolinor Mar 21 '13 at 18:52

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 21 '13 at 17:24

2

If you can use SED GOOGLE GNUSED

sed s/A/\nA/g <yourfile >resultfile

answered Mar 21 '13 at 17:24

Magoo

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 21 '13 at 18:48

Notepad++

This is just a find and replace if you have notepad++ installed on your computer
(http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.3.1.html)

Open your text file, press Ctrl H to get Find & Replace

Select Search Mode as Extended or Regular expression

Find A

Replace \nA

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

Windows batch:

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

echo contents of oldfile.txt:
type oldfile.txt
echo;

del newfile.txt
for /f "usebackq delims=" %%I in ("oldfile.txt") do (
    set "str=%%I" && set "str=!str:A=,A!"
    for %%x in (!str!) do (>>"newfile.txt" echo %%x)
)

echo contents of newfile.txt:
type newfile.txt

Example output:

C:\Users\me\Desktop>test.bat
contents of oldfile.txt:
ABCABCABCABCABC

contents of newfile.txt:
ABC
ABC
ABC
ABC
ABC

Here's more info on splitting a string in batch.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 21 '13 at 18:29

JScript:

var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var read = fso.OpenTextFile("oldfile.txt", 1, 2);
var write = fso.CreateTextFile("newfile.txt", true);
var str = read.ReadAll();
write.Write(str.replace(/A/g,'\nA').replace(/^\n/m,''));
read.Close(); write.Close();

The second .replace removes the first new line if it occurs as the first character of the text. Save this script with a .js extension and execute it with cscript filename.js.

How to make a new line in a text file at every instance of character X - Windows 7?

5 Answers5