Change some field separators in awk

Question

I have a input file 1.txt

joshwin_xc8@yahoo.com:1802752:2222:
ihearttofurkey@yahoo.com:1802756:111113
www.rothmany@mail.com:xxmyaduh:13@;:3A

and I want an output file: out.txt

joshwin_xc8@yahoo.com||o||1802752||o||2222:
ihearttofurkey@yahoo.com||o||1802756||o||111113
www.rothmany@mail.com||o||xxmyaduh||o||13@;:3A

I want to replace the first two ':' in 1.txt with '||o||', but with the script I am using

awk -F: '{print $1,$2,$3}' OFS="||o||" 3.txt

But it is not giving the expected output. Any help would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Perl solution:

perl -pe 's/:/||o||/ for $_, $_' 1.txt

• -p reads the input line by line and prints each line after processing it
• s/// is similar to substitution you might know from sed
• for in postposition runs the previous command for every element in the following list
• $_ keeps the line being processed

For higher numbers, you can use for ($_) x N where N is the number. For example, to substitute the first 7 occurrences:

perl -pe 's/:/||o||/ for ($_) x 7' 1.txt

Answer 2

Following sed may also help you in same.

sed 's/:/||o||/;s/:/||o||/'  Input_file

Explanation: Simply substituting 1st occurrence of colon with ||o|| and then 2nd occurrence of colon now becomes 1st occurrence of colon now and substituting that colon with ||o|| as per OP's requirement.

Answer 3

Perl solution also, but I think the idea can apply to other languages: using the limit parameter of split:

perl -nE 'print join q(||o||), split q(:), $_, 3' file

(q quotes because I'm on Windows)

Answer 4

Suppose if we need to replace first 2 occurrence of : use below code

Like this you can change as per your requirement suppose if you need to change for first 7 occurences change {1..2} to {1..7}.

Out put will be saved in orginal file. it wont display the output

 for i in {1..2}
> do
> sed -i "s/:/||o||/1" p.txt
> done