How can I capitalize letters before a certain character? (^)

Question

I would like to convert this:

foo^bar
ba^rfoo
oofrab
raboof^

To this:

FOObar
BArfoo
oofrab
RABOOF

Anything before the "^" (or another special character if it makes it easier) gets capitalized

Also, the removal of the "^" is also not required if it makes it easier.

Answer 1

Using GNU sed (Ubuntu's default) (thanks to pabouk for the -r option suggestion):

< inputfile sed -r 's/^(.*)\^/\U\1\E/' > out

Using perl (thanks to Oli for the shortened regex):

< inputfile perl -pe 's/^(.*)\^/\U\1\E/' > out

---

Command #1 breakdown:

• < inputfile: redirects the content of inputfile to stdin
• -r: allows the use of extended regexes
• > out: redirects the content of stdout to out

Command #2 breakdown:

• < inputfile: redirects the content of inputfile to stdin
• > out: redirects the content of stdout to out

Regex breakdown:

• s: performs a substitution
• /: starts the regex
• ^: matches the start of the line
• (: starts the first capturing group
• .*: matches any number of characters
• ): stops the first capturing group
• \^: matches a ^ character
• /: stops the regex / starts the replacement
• \U: starts converting to uppercase
• \1: replaces with the first capturing group
• \E: stops converting to uppercase
• /: stops the replacement

Answer 2

Using vim:

vim -es '+g/\^/normal gUf^' +wq foo

• The -es turns on the venerable ex mode, and silences vim (mostly).
• + is used to provide vim commands as command-line arguments.
• g/\^/ - run the command on all lines matching /\^/
• normal - run the rest of the command as a normal mode action.
• gUf^ - convert to uppercase (gU) until ^ (f^). While using a range g/.../ in this case), the cursor is placed at the start of each line before executing the command.
• Then save and quit (wq).

f looks for the first ^, so lines with multiple ^ would have only the field converted. There's no simple motion for finding the last ^. You can try going to the end of the line and searching backwards ($F^), but that would fail if ^ is the last character. So, you would need to do it in two steps:

vim -es '+g/\^./norm $F^gU0' '+g/\^$/norm gU$' +wq foo

Answer 3

EDIT

So after about hour and half , I came up with this:

awk -F' ' '{ gsub(/\^/,"@ "); for (i=1;i<=NF;i++){ if($i ~ /\@/) $i = toupper($i);};gsub("@ ","");gsub("@",""); print   }  ' removecharsfile 

Basic ideas:

• get rid of ^ and replace it with @ plus space
• Treat space as field delimiter; now we have fields to play with
• for loop to step through each field in each line, and check if there is @ character.
• if there is @ character, convert that field to upper. Why $i = toupper($i) ? Because otherwise it doesn't get stored anywhere
• after the loop is done, get rid of @+space, and any @ at the end of fields.
• print everything

Perhaps better approach to writing all this on one line is to put it in a file ( neatly organized bellow ), and run that with awk like so awk -f awkscript theinputfile

# awk script to capitalize
# whatever comes before caret(^)


{
  gsub (/\^/, "@ ");
  for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++)
    {
      if ($i ~ /\@/)
        $i = toupper ($i);
    };
  gsub ("@ ", "");
  gsub ("@", "");
  print

}

And here it is in action:

ORIGINAL POST

I'll contribute my own code version with awk:

awk -F'^' '{print toupper($1)$2}' thefile

And of course you can redirect output with > output.txt And here it is in action:

Answer 4

I would set ^ as field separator in awk in upper case the first field:

$ awk 'BEGIN{FS="^"; OFS=""} NF>1{$1=toupper($1)}1' file
FOObar
BArfoo
oofrab
RABOOF

By saying OFS="" we set the output field separator to the empty string, so that the ^ is removed. If this is not needed, awk -F"^" '{$1=toupper($1)}1' file alone would make it; it converts all ^ into spaces.

Note we use NF>1 in order to perform the upper case in case there is at least one ^.

Answer 5

Bash can also do this, so I'll throw a bash answer into the mix.

#bash
while IFS= read -r line; do
    if [[ $line = *^* ]]; then
        tmp=${line%%^*} 
        line=${tmp^^}${line#*^}
    fi
    printf '%s\n' "$line"
done < inputfile > outptufile

This is just iterating the inputfile line-by-line (BashFAQ 1), and using parameter expansions to do the splitting and uppercasing (BashFAQ 73).

Answer 6

Through python3,

Without using re module,

with open(file) as f:
    for line in f:
        if '^' in line:
            m = line.strip().split('^')
            print(m[0].upper() + m[1])
        else:
            print(line, end="") 

With using re module.

import re
with open(file) as f:
    for line in f:
        print(re.sub(r'(.*)\^', lambda m: m.group(1).upper(), line.strip()))

Replace file in the above scripts with the actual file path. And run the script using python3 command.

Answer 7

An other awk version:

awk '{ a=$_; ismatch=sub(/\^.*/, "", a); b=gensub(/.*\^(.*)/, "\\1", "", $_); if(ismatch==1) { print toupper(a) b} else { print b} }' testdata

human readable ;)

awk '{
  a=$_;
  ismatch=sub(/\^.*/, "", a);
  b=gensub(/.*\^(.*)/, "\\1", "", $_);
  if(ismatch==1) {
    print toupper(a) b
  }
  else {
     print b
  }
}' testdata

Answer 8

Another python approach:

#!/usr/bin/env python2
with open('/path/to/file.txt') as f:
    for line in f:
        if '^' in line:
            index = line.find('^')
            print line[:index].upper() + line[index+1:].rstrip()
        else:
            print line.rstrip()

Output :

FOObar
BArfoo
oofrab
RABOOF

• index = line.find('^') contains the index of the character ^

• line[:index].upper() prints the characters before index (^) in uppercase (upper())

• line[index+1:] prints the characters after ^ literally

• rstrip() will remove the trailing newlines added by print by default.

EDIT :

Now if you have a file like this (multiple ^) :

foo^bar^spam
ba^rfoo^egg
oofrab
raboof^spamegg

and you want to make it like:

FOOBARspam
BARFOOegg
oofrab
RABOOFspamegg

In this case you can use:

#!/usr/bin/env python2
with open('/path/to/file.txt') as f:
    for line in f:
        if '^' in line:
            index = line.rfind('^')
            print line[:index].upper().replace('^', '') + line[index+1:].rstrip()
        else:
            print line.rstrip()

Output :

FOOBARspam
BARFOOegg
oofrab
RABOOFspamegg

Only replacements are rfind('^') instead of find('^'), which will find the index of rightmost ^ and replace('^', '') will replace all ^s with blanks.