ansaurus

Question

AWK scripting :How to remove Field separator using awk

Answer 1

+3 A:

If the data is really that uniform, a very simple pipe to:

cut -b 2-8

will do it for you.

(Oh, apart from the first two lines; get rid of them with grep ^\[ in your pipeline, if you need to)

Bobby Jack 2010-06-02 12:40:21

I think he wanted the answer in awk. Also, that grep needs to be for '^\['.

whaley 2010-06-02 13:09:32

Good point on the grep - will edit. I'm not sure about the awk restriction though - it's mentioned in the title, but not the question itself. I can't think why awk would be required, other than as a learning exercise - which is valid, of course.

Bobby Jack 2010-06-02 13:16:50

I +1'ed you for the simplicity and usefulness of the answer anyway. cut is much easier to read/write for this case.

whaley 2010-06-02 17:34:18

Answer 2

+2 A:

I think what you want is:

awk '/^\[.*\]/  {print substr($1,2,7)}' < ~/tmp/awk_test/file

This assumes that your first field is exactly 9 (7 of them are the ones you want) characters each time. If this is not the case, then use the following instead to strip off of the [ and the ] from the first field:

awk '/^\[.*\]/  {gsub(/[\[\]]/,"",$1); print $1 }' < ~/tmp/awk_test/file

whaley 2010-06-02 12:57:58

Answer 3

+1 A:

Here's a solution which only involves awk. The idea is to let awk parse the desired column and remove the undesired square brackets from this token. The only "trick" is to "escape" the [ character lest it is understood as an opening re set. (We could also use substr instead since the brackets are expected as the first and last characters)

{
     #skip the column header lines
     if (NR < 3)
       next;

     # $1 is almost what we want: [xxxx] 
     #   ==> just remove the square brackets
     sub("[[]", "", $1);
     sub("]", "", $1);
     print $1;
}

mjv 2010-06-02 13:08:21

Answer 4

A:

awk -F"[][]" 'NR>2{print $2}' file

ghostdog74 2010-06-04 04:24:25

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

AWK scripting :How to remove Field separator using awk

related questions