concatXlines.pl - the concatenator!

Somebody needed a program to put 4 contiguous lines of a file on the same line starting from the beginning of the file and going to the end.

Well, here it is with a simple improvement - you can set the number of lines to concatenate. One notice - this works on Linux - Unix files. A Perl program to convert Windows files with carriage returns (\r) and end of line (\n) characters to Unix/Linux files with only end of line characters can be found here.

You can find this program here.

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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# Author: Michael W Folsom
# April 8, 2007
#
# USAGE: ./concatXlines.pl num_lines_to_concat input_file_name
#
# PURPOSE: To cocatenate date from X contiguous lines to a single
# line. For example if the data is organized like so:
# 1
# 2
# 3
# 4
#
# And the program is told to convert 4 lines to 1 you would get:
# 1 2 3 4
#
#

# stash the number of arguments
# $#ARGV + 1 is ARGC in C, C++ land
$argNumber = $#ARGV + 1;

sub usageStatement {
print "\nUsage: ./concatXlines.pl num_lines_to_concat input_file_name\n\n";
}

if($argNumber != 2) {
&usageStatement();
exit(1);
}

# use the open command to open the input file for reading
open(FILE, $ARGV[1]);

$numLines = $ARGV[0];
$newStr ="";
$i = 0;

while () {
# chop off newline character
chomp($_);

# chugger through file X lines at a time and build up new
# output line
if($i < $numLines) {
$newStr = $newStr . $_;
$i++;
if($i < $numLines) {
#print "\t";
$newStr = $newStr . "\t";
}
# got data from X lines, print and add a new line
else {
print "$newStr \n";
$i= 0;
$newStr = "";
}
}
}

# if number of lines not equal to 4 then print out remainder
if($newStr) {
print "$newStr\n";
}

close(FILE);

exit();
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