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:
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$ echo '"School","College","City"'|awk -F'","|^"|"$' '{for(i=1;i< =NF;i++) {if($i)print $i}}'
School
College
City
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I just used this to help parse the output of drush pml. Since it uses more than one space to separate fields, I used
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awk -F' +' '{print $2"\t"$4"\t"$5}'
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(that’s two spaces and a plus sign for the field separator). I initially tried using
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' {2,}' |
but apparently that’s some kind of super advanced regex that awk doesn’t understand.
Another cool thing about the StackOverflow page is that one person shows how you can parse a CSV with embedded / escaped commas if you have gawk 4 installed:
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% cat infile
"School",College: "My College","City, I"
% awk '{
for (i = 0; ++i < = NF;)
print i, substr($i, 1, 1) == "\042" ?
substr($i, 2, length($i) - 2) : $i
}' FPAT='([^,]+)|(\"[^\"]+\")' infile
1 School
2 College: "My College"
3 City, I
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About The Author
Charlie Herron
Denizen of Portland, Maine; tech jack; lover / hater / whatever; philosophical dabbler. http://twitter.com/realgeek