Bourne shell script to convert a number to telephone format

I want to ch开发者_Python百科ange a number such as 1234567890 to 456-7890; is there a way to do this in Unix Shell programming?

@OP, you have given details about the conditions of changing the numbers. you can just use bash on your solaris 10 to do that, no need fancy regular expression in your case.

 $ n=1234567890    
 $ echo "${n:3:3}-${n:6}"
 456-7890

This is what DigitalRoss and Jonathan Leffler were trying to say:

echo "1234567890"|sed 's/[0-9][0-9][0-9]\([0-9][0-9][0-9]\)\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\)/\1-\2/'

This should work on all but the most brain-dead versions of sed, however it pays no attention to word boundaries, etc., or whether there are additional digits or groups of digits on the same line. It simply reformats the first ten digit sequence it finds. If you have spaces, tabs, commas or other delimiters, they can be used to further restrict the match.

$ sed -e 's/...\(...\)\(....\)/\1-\2/'
1234567890
456-7890

You could select digit string words a bit more carefully, though not perfectly, with:

sed -e 's/\b[0-9]..\([0-9]..\)\([0-9]...\)\b/\1-\2/'

G'day,

Don't forget the anchors to get the last seven digits of the string. Something like:

echo "1234567890" | sed -e 's/\([0-9]{3}\)\([0-9]{4}\)$/\1-\2/'

HTH

cheers,

Shell scripts are basically just a bunch of commands, piped together, you can simply call any scripting language (such as Python/Ruby/Perl) as you would sed/awk/grep.

For example, using Ruby:

$ echo "Change 1234567890 to 456-7890" | ruby -e 'puts $stdin.read.gsub(/\d{3}(\d{3})(\d{3})/){|x| "#{$1}-#{$2}"}'

..which outputs:

Change 456-7890 to 456-7890

There are a few benefit of using (for example) Ruby over sed:

• Ruby/etc will be more consistent over multiple platforms than sed/awk/grep, which tend to take different arguments and function slightly differently, depending on the which OS/distribution is being used
• If the command becomes becomes more complicated, it is trivial to turn this into a "proper" script