Oneliner to merge lines with same first field

Question

This is my first codegolf question, so I apologize in advance if it's not appropriate, and I welcome any feedback.

I have a file with this format:

a | rest of first line
b | rest of second line
b | rest of third line
c | rest of fourth line
d | rest of fifth line
d | rest of sixth line

The actual contents vary, as does the delimiter. The contents are just text. The delimiter only appears once per line. For this puzzle, feel free to change the delimiter, e.g. use "%" as the delimiter.

Desired output:

a | rest of first line
b | rest of second line % rest of third line
c | rest of fourth line
d | rest of fifth line % rest of sixth line

I already have both ruby and awk scripts to merge this, but I suspect it's possible to have a short oneliner. i.e. a one-liner that can be used along with pipes and other commands on the command line. I can't figure it out, and my own script is to long to just compress on the command line.

Shortest characters preferred. Input is not necessarily sorted, but we are only interested in merging consecutive lines with matching first fields. There are unlimited lines with matching first fields. Field 1 could be anything, e.g. names of fruits, proper names, etc.

(I run on MacOS, so I am personally most interested in implementations that run on the mac).

---

Here is a second example/test. Notice "|" is the delimiter. The space before the "|" is irrelevant, and if resent should be considered part of the key. I am using "%" as a delimited in the output, but again, feel free to change the delimiter (but don't used square brackets).

Input:

why|[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation
whom|[used in] questions, subordination
whom|[possessive] whose
whom|[subjective] who
whoever|[objective] whomever
whoever|[possessive] whosever
who|[possessive] whose
who|[objective] whom

Desired output:

why|[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation
whom|[used in] questions, subordination%[possessive] whose%[subjective] who
whoever|[objective] whomever%[possessive] whosever
who|[possessive] whose%[objective] whom

Answer 1

Retina, 17 bytes

• 12 bytes saved thanks to @MartinEnder
• 1 byte saved thanks to @jimmy23013

Scored in ISO 8859-1 encoded bytes.

Uses ; instead of | as the input field separator.

(?<=(.+;).+)¶\1
%

Try it online.

Answer 2

V, 16 13 bytes

òí^¨á«©.*úsî±

Try it online!

You said

Feel free to change the delimiter

So I picked | as the delimiter. If this is invalid, let me know and I'll change it.

Explanation:

ò                #Recursively:
 í               #Search for the following on any line:
  ^¨á«©          #1 or more alphabetic characters at the beginning of the line
       .*        #Followed by anything
         ús      #Mark everything after this to be removed:
           î±    #A new line, then the first match again (one or more alphabetic characters)

Answer 3

Perl -0n, 2 + 43 = 45 bytes

s/
.*\|/%/g,print for/(.*\|)((?:
\1|.)*
)/g

Demo:

$ perl -0ne 's/
> .*\|/%/g,print for/(.*\|)((?:
> \1|.)*
> )/g' <<EOF
> why|[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation
> whom|[used in] questions, subordination
> whom|[possessive] whose
> whom|[subjective] who
> whoever|[objective] whomever
> whoever|[possessive] whosever
> who|[possessive] whose
> who|[objective] whom
> EOF
why|[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation
whom|[used in] questions, subordination%[possessive] whose%[subjective] who
whoever|[objective] whomever%[possessive] whosever
who|[possessive] whose%[objective] whom

Answer 4

SQL (PostgreSQL), 43 72 bytes

COPY T FROM'T'(DELIMITER'|');SELECT a,string_agg(b,'%')FROM T GROUP BY A

This takes advantage of the handy string_agg aggregate function in PostgreSQL. Input is from a table called T with 2 columns A and B. To comply with the question better I have included to command to load data from a file into the table. The file is T as well. I haven't counted the table create statement.
The output will be unordered, but if that is a problem it can be fixed with an ORDER BY A

SQLFiddle didn't want to play for me, but this is what I get in my setup.

CREATE TABLE T (A VARCHAR(9),B VARCHAR(30));

COPY T FROM'T'(DELIMITER'|');SELECT a,string_agg(b,'%')FROM T GROUP BY A
a   string_agg
--- ----------------------------------------
c   rest of fourth line
b   rest of second line%rest of third line
a   rest of first line
d   rest of fifth line%rest of sixth line

Answer 5

C, 127 bytes

o[99],n[99],p=n;main(i){for(;gets(n);strncmp(o,n,i-p)?printf(*o?"\n%s":"%s",n),strcpy(o,n):printf(" /%s",i))i=1+strchr(n,'|');}

Works with gcc. Changed delimiter to /. Takes input from stdin and writes output to stdout, so call with input redirection ./a.out <filename

Ungolfed:

o[99],n[99] //declare int, to save two bytes for the bounds
,p=n; //p is an int, saves one byte as opposed to applying an (int) cast to n,
//or to declaring o and n as char arrays
main(i){for(;gets(n);strncmp(o,n,i-p //an (int)n cast would be needed;
// -(n-i) does not work either,
//because pointer arithmetics scales to (int*)
)?printf(*o?"\n%s":"%s" //to avoid a newline at the beginning of output
,n),strcpy(o,n):printf(" /%s",i))i=1+strchr(n,'|');}

Answer 6

Pyth - 15 bytes

Making a few assumptions about the problem, will change when OP clarifies.

jm+Khhd-sdK.ghk

Try it online here.

Answer 7

Python 3 - 146 Bytes

Input is the filename or file path of the file, output is to stdout. Could be a lot shorter if I could take input as raw text from command line

Takes input from stdin and outputs to stdin. Setup with separator "|". To test the first example input use the separator " | "

from itertools import*
for c,b in groupby([x.split("|")for x in input().split("\n")],key=lambda x:x[0]):print(c,"|"," % ".join((a[1]for a in b)))

Answer 8

Java 7, 167 bytes

It can probably be golfed more by using a different approach..

import java.util.*;Map c(String[]a){Map m=new HashMap();for(String s:a){String[]x=s.split("=");Object l;m.put(x[0],(l=m.get(x[0]))!=null?l+"%"+x[1]:x[1]);}return m;}

NOTE: The method above creates and returns a HashMap with the desired key-value pairs. However, it doesn't print it in the exact output as in OP's question with | as output-delimiter between the keys and new values. Judging by MickeyT's SQL answer where he returned a database table I figured this is allowed; if not more bytes should be added for a print function.

Ungolfed & test code:

import java.util.*;

class Main{

    static Map c(String[] a){
        Map m = new HashMap();
        for(String s : a){
            String[] x = s.split("\\|");
            Object l;
            m.put(x[0], (l = m.get(x[0])) != null
                            ? l + "%" + x[1]
                            : x[1]);
        }
        return m;
    }

    public static void main(String[] a){
        Map m = c(new String[]{
            "why|[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation",
            "whom|[used in] questions, subordination",
            "whom|[possessive] whose",
            "whom|[subjective] who",
            "whoever|[objective] whomever",
            "whoever|[possessive] whosever",
            "who|[possessive] whose",
            "who|[objective] whom"
        });

        // Object instead of Map.EntrySet because the method returns a generic Map
        for (Object e : m.entrySet()){
            System.out.println(e.toString().replace("=", "|"));
        }
    }
}

Output:

whoever|[objective] whomever%[possessive] whosever
whom|[used in] questions, subordination%[possessive] whose%[subjective] who
why|[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation
who|[possessive] whose%[objective] whom

Answer 9

PowerShell, 85 bytes

Strings are merged using hashtable:

%{$h=@{}}{$k,$v=$_-split'\|';$h.$k=($h.$k,$v|?{$_})-join'%'}{$h.Keys|%{$_+'|'+$h.$_}}

Example

Since PowerShell doesn't support stdin redirection via <, I'm assuming that Get-Content .\Filename.txt | will be used as default I/O method.

Get-Content .\Filename.txt | %{$h=@{}}{$k,$v=$_-split'\|';$h.$k=($h.$k,$v|?{$_})-join'%'}{$h.Keys|%{$_+'|'+$h.$_}}

Output

whoever|[objective] whomever%[possessive] whosever
why|[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation
whom|[used in] questions, subordination%[possessive] whose%[subjective] who
who|[possessive] whose%[objective] whom

Answer 10

APL, 42 chars

{⊃{∊⍺,{⍺'%'⍵}/⍵}⌸/↓[1]↑{(1,¯1↓'|'=⍵)⊂⍵}¨⍵}

Answer 11

Sed, 55 bytes

:a N;:b s/^\([^|]*\)|\([^\n]*\)\n\1|/\1|\2 %/;ta;P;D;tb

---

Test run :

$ echo """why|[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation
> whom|[used in] questions, subordination
> whom|[possessive] whose
> whom|[subjective] who
> whoever|[objective] whomever
> whoever|[possessive] whosever
> who|[possessive] whose
> who|[objective] whom""" | sed ':a N;:b s/^\([^|]*\)|\([^\n]*\)\n\1|/\1|\2 %/;ta;P;D;tb'
why|[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation
whom|[used in] questions, subordination %[possessive] whose %[subjective] who
whoever|[objective] whomever %[possessive] whosever
who|[possessive] whose %[objective] whom

Answer 12

q/kdb+, 46 bytes

Solution:

exec"%"sv v by k from flip`k`v!("s*";"|")0:`:f

Example:

q)exec"%"sv v by k from flip`k`v!("s*";"|")0:`:f
who    | "[possessive] whose%[objective] whom"
whoever| "[objective] whomever%[possessive] whosever"
whom   | "[used in] questions, subordination%[possessive] whose%[subjective] who"
why    | "[may express] surprise, reluctance, impatience, annoyance, indignation"

Explanation:

`:f            // assumes the file is named 'f'
("s*";"|")0:   // read in file, assume it has two columns delimitered by pipe
flip `k`v      // convert into table with columns k (key) and v (value)
exec .. by k   // group on key
"%"sv v        // join values with "%"