CODEWITHSUNDEEP
awkgsub
user3639782
user3639782

Reputation: 517

awk condition on whether pattern is matched

I am trying to have awk alter a given pattern if matched or return the original line. Here's my code

printf 'hello,"hru, bro"\nhi,bye\n' | gawk 'match($0, /"([^"]+)"/, m) {if (m[1] == "") {print $0} else {print gsub(/,/,"",m[1])}}'

-> 1

I expect `match to return the matched pattern in m[1] and gsub to substitute all ',' in m[1] when there is a match. Thus the result should be

-> hello,hru bro\nhi,bye

What am I missing here?

UPDATE

According to Tom comment I replace gsubwith gensub, yet I now get the following result:

-> gawk: cmd. line:1: (FILENAME=- FNR=1) warning: gensub: third argument `hru, bro' treated as 1
hello"hru, bro"

Upvotes: 0

Views: 793

Answers (1)

Tom Fenech
Tom Fenech

Reputation: 74595

gsub mutates the third argument and returns the number of substitutions made - in this case, 1.

I would suggest changing your code to something like this:

awk 'match($0, /([^"]*")([^"]+)(".*)/, m) { 
    $0 = m[1] gensub(/,/, "", "g", m[2]) m[3] 
} 1'

If there is anything surrounded by quotes on the line, then rebuild it, using gensub to remove the commas from the middle captured group (i.e. the part between the double quotes).

Note that gensub takes 4 arguments, where the third is used to specify the number of replacements to be made ("g" means global).

Upvotes: 1

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