Help with simple scripting problem 2

Gabriel wrote on Apr 08, 2009

Hi,

I have a two column file like this:

text1 text2
text3 text4
...

and I want to access the first 'n' columns and print them to a file. I've tried this (among a bunch of other things, but this one seems to be the more reasonable one to me:

for (i=1; i<=5; i+=1) {
fscan (filename, m1, m2)
print (m1, m2, >> output)
}

I get an "undefined local variable 'm1' " (m1 and m2 are defined as string variables).

Thanks!

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Apr 08, 2009

See the FIELDS task, it'll let you select columns from a text file over a range of rows. The 'undefined variable' message likely means the scan into the variable failed, e.g. 'filename' isn't a struct variable or you read past the end of the input.

-Mike

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Gabriel wrote on Apr 08, 2009

I'm sorry, I made a mistake. Where it says "and I want to access the first 'n' columns and print them to a file" it should say "and I want to access the first 'n' LINES and print them to a file"

Thanks again!

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Apr 08, 2009

Try

cl> fields myfile.txt "1,2" "1-5" > newfile.txt

Will write columns 1 and 2 from the first 5 lines to 'newfile.txt'

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Gabriel wrote on Apr 08, 2009

This is how I got it to work:

cl> fields myfile.txt "1-2" lines="1-5" > newfile.txt

Thanks Mike!

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Last post on Apr 08, 2009