singlemerge

A small python script to merge multiple lines of a single file using a key field

Getting Started

This project provides a simple and portable python script which can be used to merge the lines of a single file by using a key field

Prerequisites

Python 3 installation

Installing

Just copy the file simpleMail.py to your preferred working directory and call it with their Python 3 interpreter

cp src/simpleMail.py YOUR_DIRECTORY

Execution

python simpleMail.py [ARGS]

Where the arguments are:

required arguments:
  -t SEPARATOR, --separator SEPARATOR
                        The field separator for input/output file
                        
  -i FILE, --input FILE
                        The input file to be processed
                        
  -k FIELD_NUM, --key-field FIELD_NUM
                        The field num to be used as merging key
                        
optional arguments:

  -o FILE, --output FILE
                        The output file to be generated.
                        
  -m [FIELD ...], --merge-field [FIELD ...]
                        List of fields concatenate
                        
  -f SEPARATOR, --merge-separator SEPARATOR
                        The separator for concatenated lines
                        
  -v FIELD STRING, --sum-value FIELD STRING
                        The field to concatenate
                        
  -s true|false, --skip-header true|false
                        true to skip the first line of the file, false otherwise. Default = "false"

  -h, --help            show thes help message and exit

It's important to note that the input file must be sorted in the key field before using this script, otherwise it will not work correctly.

Examples

Suppose you have a file named "input.txt" with the following content:

0,cat,cake
0,dog,bread
0,elephant,cookie
1,rocket,sky
1,planet,earth
2,audio,book

Then, by executing the following command:

python src/singlemerge.py -i ~/test -t , -k 1 -m 2 3 -f -

It will produce the following output:

0,cat-dog-elephant,cake-bread-cookie
1,rocket-planet,sky-earth
2,audio,book

The provided command informed the script to separate the fields by comma, look at the first field for key and merge the content of fields 2 and 3 with dash

It's possible to execute the script without merging all fields:

python src/singlemerge.py -i ~/test -t , -k 1 -m 3 -f -

In this case, the program will just merge the field 3 and keep the last line of field 2, producing the result below:

0,elephant,cake-bread-cookie
1,planet,sky-earth
2,audio,book

Authors

• Jonathan Gangi - Initial work - JAVGan

License

This project is licensed under the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v2.1 - see the LICENSE file for details