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I have file with the value say which is delimited with |

123-|aaa|bbb|123|123.0|123-|123.01-|-123.02|123.03-|aaa|bbb|123-|aaa-|-bbb|cc-cc|123.04-|aa123-|123.05-

I need to pick the column values which end with -, the column picked up should be a numeric value and then move the - to start of the value.

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could you add an example, it a bit unclear what you want to do –  Kiwy 2 days ago
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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

POSIXly:

sed ':1
     s/^\(.*|\)\{0,1\}\([0-9.]*[0-9][0-9.]*\)-\(|.*\)\{0,1\}$/\1-\2\3/
     t1'

Or with awk in a more intuitive way:

awk -F '|' -v 'OFS=|' '{
  for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++)
    if ($i ~ /^[0-9]*(\.[0-9]+)?-$/)
      $i = "-" substr($i, 1, length($i)-1)
  print}'

(that version is stricter in what it considers to be a number, the sed one would accept 1...2 as a number for instance).

On your input, that gives:

-123|aaa|bbb|123|123.0|-123|-123.01|-123.02|-123.03|aaa|bbb|-123|aaa-|-bbb|cc-cc|-123.04|aa123-|-123.05
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up vote 2 down vote

You can do it by anchoring the match to the beginning of the line or a separator. For example with a GNU sed extended regular expression:

sed -r ':a; s/(^|\|)([0-9.]+)-(\||$)/\1-\2\3/; ta' infile

Output:

-123|aaa|bbb|123|123.0|-123|-123.01|-123.02|-123.03|aaa|bbb|-123|aaa-|-bbb|cc-cc|-123.04|aa123-|-123.05
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Hi Thor, Executed with the follwing command it throws a error sed -r 's/(^|\|)([0-9.]+)-/\1-\2/g' d1.txt sed: illegal option -- r Usage: sed [-n] [-e script] [-f source_file] [file...] –  Meghana Prakash 2 days ago
    
@MeghanaPrakash: This was tested with GNU sed. Which version of sed are you using? –  Thor 2 days ago
    
@StephaneChazelas: good point, I added a terminal anchor as well, thanks. –  Thor 2 days ago
    
Hi Thor, it works now thank you very much :) –  Meghana Prakash 2 days ago
    
@StephaneChazelas: Interesting, this seems to be because of overlapping matches. It can be fixed by looping, as you have already found. –  Thor 2 days ago
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