CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashawk
lsterzinger
lsterzinger

Reputation: 717

Wildcards in awk

I'm having a bit of a problem trying to select specific lines of data in awk. I want data the starts with FWA20120629, then has 4 numbers I don't care about, then has and 18,19,or 20, and then two more characters I don't care about. I've tried this:

awk '{if ($2 ~ /FWA20120629....[18-20]../) print $2,$5,$6}' ...

and 

awk '{if ($2 ~ /FWA20120629????[18-20]??/) print $2,$5,$6}' ...

an example line that would fit this criteria is

FWA2012062903001800

I'm clearly missing something, and I'm not familiar enough with awk to figure it out.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1306

Answers (1)

Mat
Mat

Reputation: 206909

[...] are character classes in regular expressions. [18-20] doesn't match all numbers between 18 and 20, it matches the character 1, all characters between 8 and 2 (which is meaningless), and the character 0.

Try (18|19|20) instead if that's what you want.

Upvotes: 3

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