If I have an awk command
pattern { ... }
and pattern uses a capturing group, how can I access the string so captured in the block?
A:
That was a stroll down memory lane...
I replaced awk by perl a long time ago.
Apparently the AWK regular expression engine does not capture its groups.
you might consider using something like :
perl -n -e'/test(\d+)/ && print $1'
the -n flag causes perl to loop over every line like awk does.
Peter Tillemans
2010-06-02 12:50:37
Apparently someone disagrees. This web page is from 2005 : http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=5674It confirms that you cannot reuse matched groups in awk.
Peter Tillemans
2010-06-02 13:00:23
[this article](http://www.catonmat.net/blog/ten-awk-tips-tricks-and-pitfalls/) seems to agree with you too.
rampion
2010-06-02 13:10:10
As the tek-tips article states, gawk can re-use capture groups.
Dennis Williamson
2010-06-02 14:00:36