Shell script to expand input string

Question

I need help on creating a shell script which will take input string and expand as below:

Input => output

A2B3C4 => AABBBCCCC

What have you done so far to solve this and what in particular are you stuck at? — Kusalananda
– Kusalananda ♦, Commented Aug 19, 2019 at 12:34
We're not here to do your job or homework, without sharing what you've tried, this is an off-topic question to me. — Vlastimil Burián
– Vlastimil Burián, Commented Aug 19, 2019 at 12:58

cas · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-19 12:59:58Z

$ perl -e 'my @F=split //, shift;
           for my $i (0..@F) { print $F[$i] x $F[++$i]};
           print "\n"' A2B3C4
AABBBCCCC

This splits the input so that each single character becomes an element in an array (@F). Then, using perl's string multiplier operator (x) it prints every even-numbered element (starting at 0) a number of times equal to the next odd-numbered element.

or if you want it to take input from stdin rather than the command line:

$ echo $'A2B3C4\nE5F2G7' | perl -ne 'my @F=split //;
    for my $i (0..@F) { print $F[$i] x $F[++$i]};
    print "\n"' 
AABBBCCCC
EEEEEFFGGGGGGG

Both of these implementations have the flaw that it only allows single-digit strings and single-digit counts.

The following removes that limitation:

$ echo A12B3CZ4 | perl -ne '
    # insert a space between numbers and alphabetic characters.
    s/([[:alpha:]])(\d)/$1 $2/g;
    s/(\d)([[:alpha:]])/$1 $2/g;
    # split on spaces
    @F = split / /;

    for my $i (0..@F) { print $F[$i] x $F[++$i]};
    print "\n"'
AAAAAAAAAAAABBBCZCZCZCZ

Rakesh Sharma · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-19 21:52:00Z

2

With Perl you can make it like as shown:

  echo a2b3c4 |
  perl -pe 's/(\D)(\d+)/$1x$2/ge'

 aabbbcccc

answered Aug 19, 2019 at 21:52

Rakesh Sharma

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Add a comment |

Arkadiusz Drabczyk · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-19 13:01:36Z

Easy shell implementation:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

char=""
count=""

echo "$1" | while read -n1 -r c; do
    if [ "$char" = "" ]
    then
        char="$c"
        continue
    fi

    if [ "$count" = "" ]
    then
        count="$c"

    for i in $(seq 1 "$count")
    do
        printf "%s" "$char"
    done

    char=""
    count=""

    continue
    fi
done

printf "\n"

Example:

$ ./transform.sh A2B3C4D0E1
AABBBCCCCE

It doesn't work with numbers bigger than 9 though. One would have to implement some larger logic to distinguish between letters and numbers.

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