AWK blows me away
How did I not know this about awk!? Don’t get me wrong, I’m no awk expert; I’m always using some of the most simple and obvious features it has. But I almost always use the -F option to specify the field separator. Until today, I thought you could only give it either a single character or a string literal. Go ahead, laugh, I’ll wait.
From StackOverflow:
1 2 3 4 | $ echo '"School","College","City"'|awk -F'","|^"|"$' '{for(i=1;i< =NF;i++) {if($i)print $i}}' School College City |
I just used this to help parse the output of drush pml. Since it uses more than one space to separate fields, I used
1 | awk -F' +' '{print $2"\t"$4"\t"$5}' |
(that’s two spaces and a plus sign for the field separator). I initially tried using
1 | ' {2,}' |
but apparently that’s some kind of super advanced regex that awk doesn’t understand.
Another cool thing about the StackOverflow page is that one person shows how you can parse a CSV with embedded / escaped commas if you have gawk 4 installed:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | % cat infile "School",College: "My College","City, I" % awk '{ for (i = 0; ++i < = NF;) print i, substr($i, 1, 1) == "\042" ? substr($i, 2, length($i) - 2) : $i }' FPAT='([^,]+)|(\"[^\"]+\")' infile 1 School 2 College: "My College" 3 City, I |