I have a text file with the following structure:
text1;text2;text3;text4
...
I need to write a script that gets 2 arguments: the column we want to search in and the content we want to find.
So the script should output only the lines (WHOLE LINES!) that match content(arg2) found in column x(arg1).
I tried with egrep and sed, but I'm not experienced enough to finish it. I would appreciate some guidance...
Given your added information of needing to output the entire line, awk is easiest:
awk -F';' -v col=$col -v pat="$val" '$col ~ pat' $input
Explaining the above, the -v options set awk variables without needing to worry about quoting issues in the body of the awk script. Pre-POSIX versions of awk won't understand the -v option, but will recognize the variable assignment without it. The -F option sets the field separator. In the body, we are using a pattern with the default action (which is print); the pattern uses the variables we set with -v for both the column ($ there is awk's "field index" operator, not a shell variable) and the pattern (and pat can indeed hold an awk-style regex).
mawk is one variant of awk, yes. It should be compatible with what I wrote; some awks won't understand -v, but you can just list the variable settings without the -v prefix in that case (pre-POSIX syntax for command line variable settings).
cat text_file.txt| cut -d';' column_num | grep pattern
It prints only the column that is matched and not the entire line. let me think if there is a simple solution for that.
Python
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
column = 1 # the column to search
value = "the data you're looking for"
with open("your file","r") as source:
for line in source:
fields = line.strip().split(';')
if fields[column] == value:
print line
There's also a solution with egrep. It's not a very beautiful one but it works:
egrep "^([^;]+;){`expr $col - 1`}$value;([^;]+;){`expr 3 - $col`}([^;]+){`expr 4 - $col`}$" filename
or even shorter:
egrep "^([^;]+;){`expr $col - 1`}$value(;|$)" filename
grep -B1 -i "string from previous line" |grep -iv 'check string from previous line' |awk -F" " '{print $1}'
This will print your line.
