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   prokyonid (prokyonid@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Sunday, 23-Feb-2025 20:02:16 JST prokyonid

   Every week at work I get a .txt file which is basically survey results. Format is something like this:

   1/02/25
   893747 (always six digits)
   Jeff
   Completely Agree
   Disagree (this line is optional, not always present)
   Neither Agree Nor Disagree (optional)
   Random Comments (optional)
   1/07/25

   I have to take dozens of entries like that and I manually turn them into this:

   893747
   Jeff
   Completely Agree
   1/07/25

   I bet there's a way to automate this. Anyone have any suggestions?

   • Embed this notice
     botvolution (botvolution@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Sunday, 23-Feb-2025 20:02:15 JST botvolution

     in reply to

     @prokyonid

     I'd use an awk script; if each entry has the same number of lines in the same position, you could use the NR builtin variable to reorder the output; but I bet some sick twisted individual would want to do it in perl.

   • Embed this notice
     prokyonid (prokyonid@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Sunday, 23-Feb-2025 23:20:13 JST prokyonid

     in reply to

     • botvolution

     @botvolution see, that's the complication - because there are three optional questions, some entries have three extra lines, otherwise I could just use regex to select and delete eveything I don't need. That might still be possible, but I'm not great with regex so the best I've managed so far is running half a dozen search-and-replaces for every permutation of 2 or 3 answers, using a regex to delete every odd occurence of a date and then manually removing the comments if they're present.

   • Embed this notice
     botvolution (botvolution@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Monday, 24-Feb-2025 03:16:47 JST botvolution

     in reply to

     @prokyonid
     Yeah as I was typing I thought, I bet the input is inconsistent, these kind of problems are sometimes not worth the effort of automating tho