Split a text file with tabs based on character position in a line?

[desertrat]

There was (back in the Ancient Times..like MacOS 7 or 8) a marvelous little Mac utility called 'Columnbo' which let you break arbitrary text files into tab-delimited by specifying the character position to insert a tab (like  position 65. 90, and 125 in a line of text get tabs inserted so you can parse the text as a tab-delimited file.) It was invaluable in dealing with columnar-looking text data.

Is there any way to do this in BBEdit? Alternatively does anyone know of a modern replacement for Columnbo ?

[Peter Kaufman]

Excel can do this - read in fixed length stuff and save it out then as a csv file, but perhaps you're looking at a no cost solution.  I'm sure BBedit can do this, but there are others more capable of answering that.

Peter

On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 12:21 PM 'desertrat' via BBEdit Talk <bbe...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

There was (back in the Ancient Times..like MacOS 7 or 8) a marvelous little Mac utility called 'Columnbo' which let you break arbitrary text files into tab-delimited by specifying the character position to insert a tab (like  position 65. 90, and 125 in a line of text get tabs inserted so you can parse the text as a tab-delimited file.) It was invaluable in dealing with columnar-looking text data.

Is there any way to do this in BBEdit? Alternatively does anyone know of a modern replacement for Columnbo ?

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[Adriano Borgobello]

LibreOffice and NeoOffice too ;-)

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[jj]

You could try a 'Replace All' with a regular expression using column width instead of character positions.

Find:

    (.{65})(.{25})(.{35})

Replace:

    \1\t\2\t\3

HTH,

Jean Jourdain

[Bruce Johnson]

LOL, I’d forgotten I could do this in a spreadsheet!  Thanks for the suggestions, all.

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Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
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Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs

[Bruce Johnson]

Didn’t work with my example. but this is regexp wizardry beyond my knowledge (or my google-fu is weak today)

This is what I had in the find box:

(.(23)) (.(43)) (.(74)) (.(95))

 Sample data

Name                      Alias           Database                    ProhibitSendQuota    ExternalDirectoryObjectId

----                      -----           --------                    -----------------    -------------------------

Name1                    Alias1          NAMPR190000-xxxx             49.5 GB (53,150,220… objid1

Name2                    Alias2          namPR190000-xxxx             49.5 GB (53,150,220… objid2

No matches were found so nothing got replaced.

This was why I loved Columnbo, just drag a marker to the point you wanted the column to start and bang it replaced any string of spaces to a tab character.  Used it to massage large masses of text into tabular data.

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[Tom Robinson]

Not sure what your intent was with that regular expression?

This inserts tabs between columns, based on their width.  You’ll need a second pass to remove trailing spaces:

Find:  ^(.{25})(.{16})(.{29})(.{21})(.+)$

^ Anchors to start of line

( Start a capture buffer ( \1 )

. Any single character

{25} That single character 25 times

) End capture buffer

Replace:  \1\t\2\t\3\t\4\t\5

Cheers

[Bruce Johnson]

I merely copied what I saw in Jean Jourdain’s post and didn’t recognize the brackets as such. Time for bigger text in my email or new glasses . Thank you for the explanation!

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[Adriano Borgobello]

But if you want to do it with BBEdit, you could select the first text column using option key, copy & paste it to a new document and replace “\n" with "\t\n". After that, you should select and copy the next column, go to end of first row, and option-paste the text column. After that, you'll repeat replacement and so on. Easier to do than explain.

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[jj]

Another option (pun intended) is to select a multiline vertical insertion point selection by <option-dragging> the cursor vertically (that is creating a vertical selection while holding the <OPTION> key)

                                             |

      ---------------------------------------+

    /

   v

abc|def

abc|def

abc|def

And then typing a <TAB>.