Convert Country List to Continent List in Bash

Question

I am doing some geoip lookups using the geoiplookup command in Linux. This correctly returns the country codes for me but I need to break them down into continents instead of countries. I currently have a text file full of countries and am trying to determine the best way to convert these to continents using bash. I have a second text file called conversion and it looks like this:

United States:North America
Mexico:North America
Canada:North America
Argentina:South America
Bolivia:South America
Brazil:South America 
Chile:South America
etc.

I was thinking of doing some sort of loop for the name in the geo.txt file and grep the conversion.txt file and then print out anything after the :. I highly doubt that is the easiest/best way so just wanted to get a few opinions on it.

Currently I have broken down into different files a username, and geo ip and I'm merging those into one file. So I basically want to match up the username to the continent instead of the username to the country. So a txt file or continent is fine as long as it's in the same order that the country one was since that maps to the username. — Eric
– Eric, Commented Jan 27, 2014 at 21:43

Biapy · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-27 20:24:54Z

I would do the opposite of your proposition:

Loop on the coutry:continent (conversion.txt) file and use sed to make the change in a copy of geo.txt:

GEO_FILE="geo.txt"
CONVERSION_FILE="conversion.txt"

TARGET_FILE="continent-${GEO_FILE}"

cp "${GEO_FILE}" "${TARGET_FILE}"

while read LINE; do
  COUNTRY="$(echo "${LINE}" | cut --delimiter=':' --fields=1)"
  CONTINENT="$(echo "${LINE}" | cut --delimiter=':' --fields=2)"

  command sed -i -e "s/${COUNTRY}/${CONTINENT}/g" "${TARGET_FILE}"
done < "${CONVERSION_FILE}"

more "${TARGET_FILE}"

user591 · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-27 20:50:17Z

2

The geoiplookup command provides information in the form

GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States

So you can get the country information with

export IP=serverfault.com
country=$(geoiplookup "$IP" | awk 'BEGIN {FS=","} ; {print $2}' | sed 's/^ //')
echo $country
United States

You can then pass this to awk

awk -v search="$country" 'BEGIN {FS=":"} ; $0 ~ search {print $2}' conversion.txt
North America

I'll leave it as an exercise for you to put some error checking and other niceties into a script.

answered Jan 27, 2014 at 20:50

user591

Hmmm.... I got your initial script working fine so I was going to try to put it in a for loop with multiple countries already in there and it fails. ---for i in cat /tmp/tmp.txt; do awk -v search="$i" 'BEGIN {FS=":"} ; $0 ~ search {print $2}' /tmp/conversion.txt; done--- It technically does the lookups but instead of outputting 7 continents to match the 7 countries, I get 23 continent outputs. I'll dig into it deeper. Thanks.

Eric
– Eric

2014-01-27 21:52:37 +00:00
Commented Jan 27, 2014 at 21:52

Add a comment |

glenn jackman · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-27 21:31:07Z

1

One thing you don't want to do is invoke sed/grep/awk for every iteration of a loop:

awk -F: 'NR==FNR {c[$1]=$2;next} {print c[$0]}' conversion.txt geo.txt > continents.txt

answered Jan 27, 2014 at 21:31

glenn jackman

88.6k16 gold badges124 silver badges179 bronze badges

Add a comment |

Stack Exchange Network

Convert Country List to Continent List in Bash

3 Answers 3

You must log in to answer this question.

Hot Network Questions

Convert Country List to Continent List in Bash

3 Answers 3

You must log in to answer this question.

Related

Hot Network Questions