Should I use AWK or SED to remove commas between quotation marks from a CSV file? (BASH)

Question

I have a bunch of daily printer logs in CSV format and I\'m writing a script to keep track of how much paper is being used and save the info to a database, but I\'v

Answer 1

As I wrote in another answer:

Rather than interfere with what is evidently source data, i.e. the stuff inside the quotes, you might consider replacing the field-separator commas (with say |) instead:

s/,([^,"]*|"[^"]*")(?=(,|$))/|$1/g

And then splitting on | (assuming none of your data has | in it).

Is it possible to write a regular expression that matches a particular pattern and then does a replace with a part of the pattern

Answer 2

There is probably an easier way using sed alone, but this should work. Loop on the file, for each line match the parentheses with grep -o then replace the commas in the line with spaces (or whatever it is you would like to use to get rid of the commas - if you want to preserve the data you can use a non printable and explode it back to commas afterward).

i=1 && IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b") && for a in $(< test.txt); do 
 var="${a}"
 for b in $(sed -n ${i}p test.txt | grep -o '"[^"]*"'); do 
  repl="$(sed "s/,/ /g"  <<< "${b}")" 
  var="$(sed "s#${b}#${repl}#" <<< "${var}")" 
 done 
 let i+=1
 echo "${var}" 
done