CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashawksedgrep
lbutlr
lbutlr

Reputation: 424

awk print all parts before a match

I have some text where I want to grab all the text up to the year, inclusive. I've tried starting with something like this

awk '/[1-2][0-9][0-9][0-9]/{print $1}'

but that only prints the first "word" of the input

"Financial summary 1997 FINAL.doc" => "Financial"
"v4 Minutes 19950705" => "v4"

What I want is "Financial summary 1997" and "v4 Minutes 1995". I've played around with $NF and various others with no success as yet I don't know how many words there are, or how many numbers there are, so I can't jut print $1 $2 $3. I don't have to use awk, but it would be useful since I am actually going to print the results out with some surrounding tags for output to an HTML file.

I can set a field separator to be "4 digits" but that discards the year

 awk -F[1-2][0-9][0-9][0-9] '{print $1}

EDIT: This is what I ended up with and then came back to see a solution posted:

awk 'match($0,/.*(19|20)[0-9]{2}/){print substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)}'

Thanks all

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1543

Answers (4)

Claes Wikner
Claes Wikner

Reputation: 1517

awk '{sub(/97/,"97\"");print $1,$2,$3}' file

"Financial summary 1997"
"v4 Minutes 19950705"

All we have to do is to print the three first fields and add a double quote after 1997. With the help of

sub the double is added but it has to be escaped first "\" that is all.

Upvotes: 0

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 784918

You can use this grep command:

grep -oE '[^"]* [1-2][0-9]{3}' file

Financial summary 1997
v4 Minutes 1995

For awk, you can use gensub:

awk '{ print substr(gensub(/^(.* [1-2][0-9]{3}).*/, "\\1", "1"), 2) }' file

Financial summary 1997
v4 Minutes 1995

Upvotes: 2

RomanPerekhrest
RomanPerekhrest

Reputation: 92854

awk solution:

awk 'match($0,/.*\<[12][0-9]{3}/){ print substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)"\042" }' file

The output:

"Financial summary 1997"
"v4 Minutes 1995"

Upvotes: 1

P....
P....

Reputation: 18351

sed -r 's/(.*[1-2][0-9][0-9][0-9]).*/\1"/' input
"Financial summary 1997"
"v4 Minutes 1995"

Upvotes: 0

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