Extract Columns From Tabular Text - Perl and Ruby

My previous posting described using the GnuWin cut command to extract columns from tabular text data but you couldn't specify columns relative to the last column. The cut command is pretty easy to use in a command console, so if you want to overcome this limitation without too additional effort, you could write an ad-hoc script using Perl or Ruby programming languages.

A Perl solution: perl -F <delimiter> -ane "print @F[-1]".

A Ruby solution: ruby -F <delimiter> -ane "print $F[-1]".

Both Perl and Ruby have the same command line switches for splitting lines: -n makes the interpreter iterate through all lines of input for the statement specified in the -e switch, the -a switch turns on the auto-split mode and -F changes the character used to split a line.

All columns in a record are collected in the global F array. For example, you extract column two using @F[1] (Perl) or $F[1] (Ruby). To extract the last column in a record, use $F[-1].

See Also

• PowerShell and Python versions
• Cut command version
• Gawk version