Perl's flipflop operator is very useful for such requirements. This
tutorial by
Grandfather is an excellent primer.
The example code below allows for an arbitrary number of lines with an empty 'day' field, it reuses the last non-empty day field read.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;use warnings;
my $day = '';
while (my $line = <DATA>) {
chomp $line;
my ($newday,$ptime,$stime,$ctime,$amount) = split /\t/,$line;
$day = $newday if $newday..$newday;
print "$day\t$ptime\t$stime\t$ctime\t$amount\n";
}
__DATA__
01-May-2007 34 11am 567 665
65 12am 657 4
64 4pm 345 3
05-May-2007 87 10pm 987 56
06-May-2007 987 9am 8899 765
567 unkn 4 3
This prints:
01-May-2007 34 11am 567 665
01-May-2007 65 12am 657 4
01-May-2007 64 4pm 345 3
05-May-2007 87 10pm 987 56
06-May-2007 987 9am 8899 765
06-May-2007 567 unkn 4 3