separate fields by comma using bash

Question

How do I place commas between fields?

Input data

12123 \'QA test case 1\' \'QA environment\'   
12234 \'UAT test case 1\' \'UAT environment\'  
         


        

Answer 1

This solution (I believe) is not very nice, but standard at least:

awk 'BEGIN{SP="[:space:]"}{gsub("(["SP"]*('\''[^'\'']*'\''|[^'\''"SP"])+)","&,");if(match($0, (",["SP"]+$")))$0=substr($0,1,RSTART-1)substr($0,RSTART+1)}1'

Though some "broken" awk implementations don't support character classes with the [[:foo:]] style, in that case you can use:

awk 'BEGIN{SP=" \t\f\v\r\n"}{gsub("(["SP"]*('\''[^'\'']*'\''|[^'\''"SP"])+)","&,");if(match($0, (",["SP"]+$")))$0=substr($0,1,RSTART-1)substr($0,RSTART+1)}1'

Note: I used '\'' to place each single quote character because that's a simple and standard way to do it. If you want to use this line in a ".awk" file, just replace every occurrence with a single quote.