Making horizontal String vertical shell or awk

Question

I have a string

ABCDEFGHIJ

I would like it to print.

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J

ie horizontal, no editing between characters to vertical. Bonus points for how to put a number next to each one with a single line. It'd be nice if this were an awk or shell script, but I am open to learning new things. :) Thanks!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8563745/loop-over-characters-in-input-string-using-awk — Eli Rose, Aug 18 '13 at 01:53
thanks, I also figured this out on my own after a lot of messing. — jeffpkamp, Aug 18 '13 at 03:52
@EliRose - the answer accepted in the question you reference has errors on almost every line, all of then newbie mistakes. You shouldn't provide it as a reference. — Ed Morton, Aug 18 '13 at 14:17
@user2348290 - the "solution" you figured out does not produce the output you requested (it adds an extra line) and will fail on some systems so I wouldn't use that. — Ed Morton, Aug 18 '13 at 14:20

Ed Morton · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-18T14:12:33.837

If you just want to convert a string to one-char-per-line, you just need to tell awk that each input character is a separate field and that each output field should be separated by a newline and then recompile each record by assigning a field to itself:

awk -v FS= -v OFS='\n' '{$1=$1}1'

e.g.:

$ echo "ABCDEFGHIJ" | awk -v FS= -v OFS='\n' '{$1=$1}1'
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J

and if you want field numbers next to each character, see @Kent's solution or pipe to cat -n.

The sed solution you posted is non-portable and will fail with some seds on some OSs, and it will add an undesirable blank line to the end of your sed output which will then become a trailing line number after your pipe to cat -n so it's not a good alternative. You should accept @Kent's answer.

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 18 '13 at 12:57

awk one-liner:

awk 'BEGIN{FS=""}{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)print i,$i}'

test :

kent$  echo "ABCDEF"|awk 'BEGIN{FS=""}{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)print i,$i}'                                                                                                       
1 A
2 B
3 C
4 D
5 E
6 F

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 18 '13 at 03:55

1

So I figured this one out on my own with sed.

 sed 's/./&\n/g' horiz.txt > vert.txt

answered Aug 18 '13 at 03:55

jeffpkamp

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added cat -n to add the number that I wanted. – jeffpkamp Aug 18 '13 at 03:57

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 19 '13 at 09:25

1

One more awk

echo "ABCDEFGHIJ" | awk '{gsub(/./,"&\n")}1'
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J

answered Aug 19 '13 at 09:25

Jotne

40,548
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That has the same problem that the similar posted sed scripts have in that it will add a trailing blank line to the end of the output. – Ed Morton Aug 19 '13 at 13:02

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 18 '13 at 15:55

0

This might work for you (GNU sed):

sed 's/\B/\n/g' <<<ABCDEFGHIJ

for line numbers:

sed 's/\B/\n/g' <<<ABCDEFGHIJ | sed = | sed 'N;y/\n/ /'

or:

sed 's/\B/\n/g' <<<ABCDEFGHIJ | cat -n

answered Aug 18 '13 at 15:55

potong

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Making horizontal String vertical shell or awk

5 Answers5