Splitting a large txt file into 200 smaller txt files on a regex using shell script in BASH

I hope the subject is clear enough, I haven't found anything specifically about this in the previously asked bin. I've tried implementing this in Perl or Python, but I think I may be trying too hard.

Is there a simple shell command / pipeline that will split my 4mb .txt file into seperate .txt files, based on a beginning and ending regex?

I provide a short sample of the file below.. so you can see that every "story" starts with the phrase "X of XXX DOCUMENTS", which could be used to split the file.

I think this should be easy and I'd be surprised if bash can't do it - faster than Per开发者_JAVA技巧l/Py.

Here it is:

                           1 of 999 DOCUMENTS


              Copyright 2011 Virginian-Pilot Companies LLC
                          All Rights Reserved
                   The Virginian-Pilot(Norfolk, VA.)

...



                           3 of 999 DOCUMENTS


                  Copyright 2011 Canwest News Service
                          All Rights Reserved
                          Canwest News Service

...

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Ross

awk '/[0-9]+ of [0-9]+ DOCUMENTS/{g++} { print $0 > g".txt"}' file

OSX users will need gawk, as the builtin awk will produce an error like awk: illegal statement at source line 1

Ruby(1.9+)

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
g=1
f=File.open(g.to_s + ".txt","w")
open("file").each do |line|
  if line[/\d+ of \d+ DOCUMENTS/]
    f.close
    g+=1
    f=File.open(g.to_s + ".txt","w")
  end
  f.print line
end

As suggested in other solutions, you could use csplit for that:

csplit csplit.test '/^\.\.\./' '{*}' && sed -i '/^\.\.\./d' xx*

I haven't found a better way to get rid of the reminiscent separator in the split files.

How hard did you try in Perl?

Edit Here is a faster method. It splits the file then prints the part files.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $count = 1;

open (my $file, '<', 'source.txt') or die "Can't open source.txt: $!";

for (split /(?=^.*\d+[^\S\n]*of[^\S\n]*\d+[^\S\n]*DOCUMENTS)/m, join('',<$file>))
{
    if ( s/^.*(\d+)\s*of\s*\d+\s*DOCUMENTS.*(\n|$)//m )
    {
        open (my $part, '>', "Part$1_$count.txt") 
            or die "Can't open Part$1_$count for output: $!";
        print $part $_;
        close ($part);
        $count++;
    }
}
close ($file);

This is the line by line method:

use strict;
use warnings;

open (my $masterfile, '<', 'yourfilename.txt') or die "Can't open yourfilename.txt: $!";

my $count = 1;
my $fh;

while (<$masterfile>) {
    if ( /(?<!\d)(\d+)\s*of\s*\d+\s*DOCUMENTS/ ) {
        defined $fh and close ($fh);
        open ($fh, '>', "Part$1_$count.txt") or die "Can't open Part$1_$count for  output: $!";
        $count++;
        next;
    }
    defined $fh and print $fh $_;
}
defined $fh and close ($fh);
close ($masterfile);

regex to match "X of XXX DOCUMENTS" is
\d{1,3} of \d{1,3) DOCUMENTS

reading line by line and starting to write new file upon regex match should be fine.

Untested:

base=outputfile
start=1
pattern='^[[:blank:]]*[[:digit:]]+ OF [[:digit:]]+ DOCUMENTS[[:blank:]]*$

while read -r line
do
    if [[ $line =~ $pattern ]]
    then
        ((start++))
        printf -v filecount '%4d' $start
        >"$base$filecount"    # create an empty file named like foo0001
    fi
    echo "$line" >> "$base$filecount"
done