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Looking for Complex Text Manipulation CLI tools
(programming.dev)
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Something like this?
Turned into
Both "Franchis" and "Cartoons" where removed/ not included with the other words.
If you wanted a somewhat cruder approach using basically ubiquitous tools, you could do something like this:
Here I'm first using
grep '^ *-'to get all lines starting with any amount of whitespace and a leading dash, then piping that togrep -v ': *$'to remove anything with a colon at the end (including those with whitespace after the colon), then usingtr '\n' ','to replace all newlines with commas, and thensed s'/,$/\n/'to replace the trailing comma with a newline again (although sed is finicky across platforms wrt newlines, so you may want to just replace it with an empty string instead).The above is hardly an efficient approach, but it does the job.
If you're feeling a little old school (and some might say masochistic), you could so a similar crude parser with a perl oneliner. This would be more efficient compute wise, but it's a bit of an acquired taste readability wise:
Here
perl -nmakes perl look at each line individually,chompstrips off the trailing newline, we match for/^\s*-\s*(.*[^:\s])\s*$/(a string starting with a dash and ending with something not a colon) and append the content of the matching parenthesis to an implicitly declared array@a. Then we add anEND{}block which will be executed after all lines are parsed, where we print the array joined on,.If you can't install a dedicated tool like
yqbut don't mind creating a standalone script, python would be able to do this out of the box on pretty much any computer, calculator or toaster you can get your hands on in 2026:This takes the first argument on the command line, parses it as yaml, finds all leaf nodes recursively, and prints a comma-separated list of the results.
If you can stick to valid YAML like your example is, you can use a reasonably short
yqcommand to get a comma-separated string of all scalar values:..goes down the tree recursively,scalarsfilters out only scalar values,[]around those two makes them an array, and piping it all tojoin(",")makes it into a comma-separated string.This is technically yaml I think, a list (with one entry) of lists that contains mostly single items but also one other list. You should be able to parse this with a yaml parser like pythons built in one.
Note that yaml is picky abiut the syntax though, so it wouldn't be able to handle deviations.