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Change the field separator

Hi, I have the following character:

CG10226/CG33120/RyR/Tsp42Eg/CG1234/Act57B/Apoltp/CG9194

and need to change the field separator from "/ " to "," so that my character will look like this:

CG10226,CG33120,RyR,Tsp42Eg,CG1234,Act57B,Apoltp,CG9194

Thanks in advance for your help!

r awk field separator
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updated by Jeffin Rockey Jeffin Rockey • written by ATCG ATCG

4 answers

In R :

library("stringr")   
str_replace_all(string = "CG10226/CG33120/RyR/Tsp42Eg/CG1234/Act57B/Apoltp/CG9194", pattern = "/", replacement = ",")
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written by Quentin M • Quentin M

Without any additional package:

gsub("/",",","CG10226/CG33120/RyR/Tsp42Eg/CG1234/Act57B/Apoltp/CG9194")
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written by ATpoint ATpoint

depends of the context :

use awk+gsub https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/String-Functions.html if it's a token among multiple columns.

just use tr if it's the whole line.

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written by Pierre Lindenbaum Pierre Lindenbaum 
sed 's|\/|,|g'
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written by Jeffin Rockey Jeffin Rockey

Hi Jeffin, Thanks for your answer. Can you be more specific please?

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written by ATCG ATCG

sed is a very handy utility which would be there is many of the unix/linux flavours.

s stands for substitute.

The | (pipes) act as separators. And it need not be | always. You may as well write like sed 's/\//,/g' (I am pretty sure it would confuse more, and hence the pipes)

\/ kind of says to look for / and just treat it as a character and do not mean any further meanings to it.

, is the replacement.

g indicates globally

In short, all this boils down to

sed, substitute a slash with a comma for all occurrences in the file.

You may use it like 

sed 's|\/|,|g' file.txt >file.comma.sep.txt
or
sed <file.txt  's|\/|,|g'  >file.comma.sep.txt
or
echo "the/slash/separated/string" | sed 's|\/|,|g'

The above will write the output after replacement to the new file, keeping input file intact.

If you prefer to substitute inside the input file itself rather than streaming out, use -i (be very very careful with this)

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written by Jeffin Rockey Jeffin Rockey

Using R, just read the file with sep:

read.table("myFile.txt", sep = "/")
#       V1      V2  V3      V4     V5     V6     V7     V8
#1 CG10226 CG33120 RyR Tsp42Eg CG1234 Act57B Apoltp CG9194
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written by zx8754 zx8754

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