gawk - Delimit lines with custom character and no similar ending character - awk

Question

Let's say I have a file like so:
test.txt
one
two
three
I'd like to get the following output: one|two|three
And am currently using this command: gawk -v ORS='|' '{ print $0 }' test.txt
Which gives: one|two|three|
How can I print it so that the last | isn't there?

Answer 1

Here's one way to do it:
$ seq 1 | awk -v ORS= 'NR>1{print "|"} 1; END{print "\n"}'
1
$ seq 3 | awk -v ORS= 'NR>1{print "|"} 1; END{print "\n"}'
1|2|3
With paste:
$ seq 1 | paste -sd'|'
1
$ seq 3 | paste -sd'|'
1|2|3

Answer 2

Convert one column to one row with field separator:
awk '{$1=$1} 1' FS='\n' OFS='|' RS='' file
Or in another notation:
awk -v FS='\n' -v OFS='|' -v RS='' '{$1=$1} 1' file
Output:
one|two|three
See: 8 Powerful Awk Built-in Variables – FS, OFS, RS, ORS, NR, NF, FILENAME, FNR

Answer 3

awk solutions work great. Here is tr + sed solution:
tr '\n' '|' < file | sed 's/\|$//'
1|2|3

Answer 4

just flatten it :
gawk/mawk 'BEGIN { FS = ORS; RS = "^[\n]*$"; OFS = "|"
} NF && ( $NF ? NF=NF : —-NF )'
ascii | = octal \174 = hex 0x7C. The reason for —-NF is that more often than not, the input includes a trailing new line, which makes field count 1 too many and result in
1|2|3|
Both NF=NF and --NF are similar concepts to $1=$1. Empty inputs, regardless of whether trailing new lines exist or not, would result in nothing printed.
At the OFS spot, you can delimit it with any string combo you like instead of being constrained by tr, which has inconsistent behavior. For instance :
gtr '\012' '高' # UTF8 高 = \351\253\230 = xE9 xAB x98
on bsd-tr, \n will get replaced by the unicode properly 1高2高3高 , but if you're on gnu-tr, it would only keep the leading byte of the unicode, and result in
1 \351 2 \351 . . .
For unicode equiv-classes, bsd-tr works as expected while gtr '[=高=]' '\v' results in
gtr: ?\230: equivalence class operand must be a single character
and if u attempt equiv-classes with an arbitrary non-ASCII byte, bsd-tr does nothing while gnu-tr would gladly oblige, even if it means slicing straight through UTF8-compliant characters :
g3bn 77138 | (g)tr '[=\224=]' '\v'
bsd-tr : 77138=Koyote 코요태 KYT✜ 高耀太
gnu-tr : 77138=Koyote ?
?
태 KYT✜ 高耀太

Answer 5

I would do it following way, using GNU AWK, let test.txt content be
one
two
three
then
awk '{printf NR==1?"%s":"|%s", $0}' test.txt
output
one|two|three
Explanation: If it is first line print that line content sans trailing newline, otherwise | followed by line content sans trailing newline. Note that I assumed that test.txt has not trailing newline, if this is not case test this solution before applying it.
(tested in gawk 5.0.1)

Answer 6

Also you can try this with awk:
awk '{ORS = (NR%3 ? "|" : RS)} 1' file
one|two|three
% is the modulo operator and NR%3 ? "|" : RS is a ternary expression.
See Ed Morton's explanation here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55998710/14259465

Answer 7

With a GNU sed, you can pass -z option to match line breaks, and thus all you need is replace each newline but the last one at the end of string:
sed -z 's/\n\(.\)/|\1/g' test.txt
perl -0pe 's/\n(?!\z)/|/g' test.txt
perl -pe 's/\n/|/g if !eof' test.txt
See the online demo.
Details:
s - substitution command
\n\(.\) - an LF char followed with any one char captured into Group 1 (so \n at the end of string won't get matched)
|\1 - a | char and the captured char
g - all occurrences.
The first perl command matches any LF char (\n) not at the end of string ((?!\z)) after slurping the whole file into a single string input (again, to make \n visible to the regex engine).
The second perl command replaces an LF char at the end of each line except the one at the end of file (eof).
To make the changes inline add -i option (mind this is a GNU sed example):
sed -i -z 's/\n\(.\)/|\1/g' test.txt
perl -i -0pe 's/\n(?!\z)/|/g' test.txt
perl -i -pe 's/\n/|/g if !eof' test.txt