Convert from comma to Column (sed)

Question

I have a *.csv file that has some text in the following format:

a, b, c 
d, e, f
g, h, i

And I would like to convert this into an *.xls file with three columns. Is it possible to do it with "sed"?

Edit: This is just an example. What I'm interested in is replacing a symbol with a column shift (if this is not impossible). Next, I want to manipulate a text that looks like this:

A single column

a[kg/m] 

to two column format

a     [kg/m]

I'm not sure it is possible, though! But I know that "sed" can do a lot of tricks to replace and modify *.csv files

Answer 1

I don't know if understand correctly the scond part of your request:

A single column a[kg/m] to two column format a [kg/m]

But this will convert your csv into a tab separated file and with the extra column before [Kg/m]:

sed -e 's/,/\t/g' -e 's:\(\[Kg/m\]\):\t\1:g' afile.csv > newfile.csv

Example:

$ cat afile.csv
a[Kg/m],b[Kg/m],c
d[Kg/m],e[Kg/m],f
g[Kg/m],h[Kg/m],i

$ sed -e 's/,/\t/g' -e 's=\(\[Kg/m\]\)=\t\1=g' afile.csv > newfile.csv

$ cat newfile.csv
a       [Kg/m]  b       [Kg/m]  c
d       [Kg/m]  e       [Kg/m]  f
g       [Kg/m]  h       [Kg/m]  i

There are two scripts in this sed command:

• -e 's/,/\t/g' replaces ',' into <tab>
• -e 's=\(\[Kg/m\]\)=\t\1=g' replaces any [Kg/m] for <tab>[Kg/m]

Now, without replacing into tabs, you can add an extra column to your csv file with this:

$ sed -e 's=\(\[Kg/m\]\)=,\1=g' afile.csv > newfile.csv
$ cat newfile.csv
a,[Kg/m],b,[Kg/m],c
d,[Kg/m],e,[Kg/m],f
g,[Kg/m],h,[Kg/m],i