Re-format cisco cli output to diplay lines correctly.

[jontittle]

Does anyone know of a tool that will reformat a cut+paste of a bgp forwarding table correctly. Maybe an excel sheet with formula embedded or something similar that will create a single line per subnet route.

I'm trying to compare 3 VRF routing tables to find duplicates. The largest is 80,000 lines.

Due to the CLI column widths on the output of 'sh ip bgp' the longer subnets cause a line break in the output. This means when I come to cut and paste into excel and then try and use the 'Text to columns' tool it does not work correctly. If I copy to Word or notepad first I have hundreds of lines to manually edit.

Surely other people out there have hit this frustrating problem ? Previously I've just bitten the bullet and fixed the formatting manually but these large routing tables will take too long to fix and possible introduce errors in the process.

Any advice ?

Thanks

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Posting

What you might be able to do is inform your telnet emulator to use a wider line, wide enough to take your bgp table without wrapping lines.

I run my emulator at 120 characters, which precludes much line wrapping vs. the common 80.

[FlorianCokl]

What you mean is this, right?

Instead of looking like:

Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete, | - multipath, & - backup, 2 - best2

   Network            Next Hop            Metric     LocPrf     Weight Path
Route Distinguisher: 10.254.254.1:32777    (L2VNI 55555)
*>l[2]:[0]:[0]:[48]:[0050.7966.6804]:[0]:[0.0.0.0]/216
                      10.253.253.1                      100      32768 i
*>i[2]:[0]:[0]:[48]:[0050.7966.6805]:[0]:[0.0.0.0]/216
                      10.253.253.2                      100          0 i

it would be nice to have it like this:

Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete, | - multipath, & - backup, 2 - best2

   Network                                               Next Hop        Metric       LocPrf   Weight Path
Route Distinguisher: 10.254.254.1:32777    (L2VNI 55555)
*>l[2]:[0]:[0]:[48]:[0050.7966.6804]:[0]:[0.0.0.0]/216  10.253.253.1                  100      32768 i
*>i[2]:[0]:[0]:[48]:[0050.7966.6805]:[0]:[0.0.0.0]/216  10.253.253.2                  100          0 i

I would love to see that, too.

[blue-iguana]

Hello Folks,

A few options and some ideas I have used in the past to address this issue:

Option 1. You can try the programmatic method, export to a file and proceed to use a script(to be written) to format the data. 

Option 2. Export the output of the data using xml, then use Excel to import the data into a worksheet. This has worked well for me in NXOS. Not sure if IOS supports this option. 

The command output for <sh vlan> import in Excel looks like this:

Thank you.