Convert vertical array data to horizontal array data

Question

I have a file with 25 matrices in a file, and each matrix is has 128 rows and 5 columns. Each matrix are putted one after the other, in a vertical way. Like this

File input(file1):

Array1 Array2 Array3 ... Array25 

I want to put each array in a horizontal way. Like this(file2)

Array1 Array2 Array3 ... Array25 

I tried to use this command :

pr -25t -w 4000 file1 > file2 

But is not working as I want.

Answer 1

Let's consider this test file with arrays with 3 rows each:

$ cat File 1 2 3 4 5 6 a b c d e f A B C D E F 

Now, let's concatenate the arrays:

$ awk -v nr=3 '{a[NR]=$0} END{for (i=1;i<=nr;i++) {for (j=i;j<=NR;j+=nr) printf "%s ",a[j]; print""}}' File 1 2 a b A B 3 4 c d C D 5 6 e f E F 

In your data file, there are 128 rows per array. In that case, run:

awk -v nr=128 '{a[NR]=$0} END{for (i=1;i<=nr;i++) {for (j=i;j<=NR;j+=nr) printf "%s ",a[j]; print""}}' File 

How it works

• -v nr=128

  This sets the variable nr to the number of rows per array.

• a[NR]=$0

  NR is the line number. We save each row (line) in the array a.

• END{for (i=1;i<=nr;i++) {for (j=i;j<=NR;j+=nr) printf "%s ",a[j]; print""}}

  After we have read in all the rows, this writes them out again in the form that you want.

  To do this, we loop over the variable i starting with i=1 and finishing with i=nr. For each i, we print the new row i. For each i value, we loop over j where j is the number of row of the old file that belongs on row i of the new file`.

Variation

Although it makes it more difficult for a beginner to read, a ternary statement can be used to give a slight improvement in the formatting:

$ awk -v nr=3 '{a[NR]=$0} END{for (i=1;i<=nr;i++) for (j=i;j<=NR;j+=nr) printf "%s%s",a[j],(j+nr<=NR?" ":"\n")}' File 1 2 a b A B 11 22 3 4 c d C D 33 44 5 6 e f E F 55 66 

j+nr<=NR?" ":"\n" is a ternary statement. It returns a space if j+nr<=NR. Otherwise, it returns a newline.