Combine list of words into one line, then add characters

Question

I want to take a file that has a list of words on each line of its own eg.

act
bat
cat
dog
eel

and put them into one line with comma separated and quoting them. So that it turns out like:

'act', 'bat', 'cat', 'dog', 'eel',

so, a single quote, then the word, then another single quote, then a comma, then a space. Then output to a new file with a new name.

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 22 '17 at 12:01

3

Short printf approach:

printf "'%s', " $(< file) > output

answered Oct 22 '17 at 12:01

RomanPerekhrest

30,212

Kusalananda · Answer 2 · 2017-10-22T12:35:07.763

2

Using sed and tr:

$ sed -e "s/^/'/" -e "s/$/', /" file | tr -d '\n'
'act', 'bat', 'cat', 'dog', 'eel',

(with no newline at the end of the output)

The sed inserts the quotes at the start and end of every line of input (and a comma and space after), while tr removes the newlines.

Redirect the output to a file:

$ sed -e "s/^/'/" -e "s/$/', /" file | tr -d '\n' >newfile

edited Oct 22 '17 at 12:35

answered Oct 22 '17 at 12:25

Kusalananda

333,661

αғsнιη · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-22T12:40:58.410

1

Using awk:

awk '{printf ("'\'%s\'', ", $0)}' infile > new_file
'act', 'bat', 'cat', 'dog', 'eel',

Or to avoid adding an extra comma at the end, use below instead.

awk '{printf S"'\''"$0"'\''";S=", "}'
'act', 'bat', 'cat', 'dog', 'eel'

Or using paste without quoting.

paste -d, -s infile
act,bat,cat,dog,eel

Then quote it with helping sed:

sed -r "s/(\w+)/'\1'/g" <(paste -d, -s infile)
'act','bat','cat','dog','eel'

edited Oct 22 '17 at 12:40

answered Oct 22 '17 at 11:43

αғsнιη

41,407

Thank you. That awk command will work on most of the files I have. If in the future I have a list file that has over 100,00 words, will it still output onto one line? – sh_newbie Oct 22 '17 at 11:48
Yes, this will do. – αғsнιη Oct 22 '17 at 11:52
Can avoid the ugly and errorprone mixed quotes with awk -vq=\' '{printf q"%s"q", ", $0}' etc somewhat like Sergiy's perl answer – dave_thompson_085 Oct 23 '17 at 09:55

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 23 '17 at 05:49

Perl approach:

$ perl -lne '$sq="\x27";push @a,$sq.$_.$sq;END{ print join( ",",@a) }' input.txt                                                                                                                                                           
'act','bat','cat','dog','eel'

here we use hex value for single quote stored in sq variable, and for each line read from file, we wrap it into single quotes
each line with single quotes is pushed into a array
once everything is read, join creates a single string of text out of each array item, joined via ,

Python approach along the same lines:

$ python -c 'import sys;sq="\x27";print ",".join([ sq + l.strip() + sq  for l in sys.stdin  ])' < input.txt                                                                                                                                 
'act','bat','cat','dog','eel'

here we redirect input file into the command's stdin stream via shell < operator
each line is stripped from newline character \n via strip method, quoted via same idea described in Perl approach
all lines are processed into a list via [item for item in iterable] structure (known as list comprehension)
and finally ",".join() lets us create a nice string out of all list items

Combine list of words into one line, then add characters

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