macOS comparing adjacent lines of file

wrathkeg · Mar 18, 2013

Hi all.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but here goes.

Is there a way, preferably using terminal commands, I can compare adjacent lines of a text file to see if they contain any of the same words?

So for a file like this

Code:

one two three
three four five
six seven eight

the first and second lines get returned (since 'three' is repeated) but not the second and third lines since they don't contain any of the same words.

Thanks.

kryten2 · Mar 18, 2013

My first thought was to use grep but that's probably not what you want for this. I guess awk would be better suited for doing such a thing.

wrathkeg · Mar 19, 2013

Thanks. To use grep I think I would need to know which string I am looking for in advance, which I don't. I'm also not sure that I could apply grep to particular lines. I'll have a look at awk.

cqexbesd · Mar 19, 2013

Not sure the exact semantics you are asking for (i.e. if 3 lines in a row have repeated words does the middle line come out twice, once for each pair?) but something like this might get you started.

Code:

perl -anE 'BEGIN { $prev = []; $, = " "; } foreach $p (@{$prev}) { if ($p ~~ @F) { say("@{$prev}\n@F"); last; }}; $prev = [ @F ]'

Just pipe in the data you want to process.

wrathkeg · Mar 19, 2013

thanks for that. I don't know much about Perl, but that certainly looks like a possibility. I have just finished putting together a script which seems to work for my needs so I am posting it here. I am sure that it is not the best way to do it, but seems to do the job. Obviously at a minimum commands could be introduced and altered to avoid the creation of all those temporary files (or at least delete them).

Code:

tail -n +2 $1 > $1-short
# find out how many lines there are to look at
a=($(wc $1-short))
# start a loop to take place as many times as there are lines
for i in $(eval echo {1..$a})
do 
  # output specified line
  sed -n -e "$i"p $1 > $1-single
  sed -n -e "$i"p $1-short > $1-short-single
  # split after every space to make columns
  tr ' ' '\n' < $1-single > $1-single-col
  tr ' ' '\n' < $1-short-single > $1-short-single-col
  # output shared words
  comm -12 <(sort $1-single-col | uniq) <(sort $1-short-single-col | uniq) > output-tmp
  # delete newlines so that empty files are really empty
  tr -d '\n' < output-tmp > output-tmp2
  # check if file is empty (no shared words) and not, send relevant lines to output
  if [[ -s output-tmp2 ]] 
  then
    cat $1-single >> output
    cat $1-short-single >> output
    echo -- >> output
  fi
done

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macOS comparing adjacent lines of file

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