[ILUG] [OT] awk FS question

[Niall O Broin]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 06:16:30PM +0100, Mark Webb wrote:

> > From: Paul Jakma [mailto:paulj at itg.ie]
> > 
> > doc's for awk say the FS can be set to a regexp. I want FS to split
> > fields on spaces, tabs, etc and '/'.
> > 
> > I've tried 
> > 
> > FS = "[:space]\/"
> >    = "[[:space:]\/]"
> >    = "[\ /]"
> >    = "/[[:space:]/]"
> >    = "/[[\/[:space:]]"
> > 
> > and loads of combinations thereof.. just can not get it to fscking do
> > what i want.. arrgggg..
> 
> [mwebb at linux ~]$ cat m
> linewithnospaces
> a space tab/slash:colon
> 
>        ^___ tab
> 
> [mwebb at linux ~]$ cat p.awk 
> #
> #
> BEGIN   { FS="[ \t/]" }
> 
>         { print "[", $1, "] [", $2, "] [", $3, "] [", $4, "]" }
> 
> END     { }
> 
> [mwebb at linux ~]$ awk -f p.awk m
> [ linewithnospaces ] [  ] [  ] [  ]
> [ a ] [ space ] [ tab ] [ slash:colon ]
> 
> Easier than perl...

Well, I couldn't let that pass :-) . For the same file  m  I submit that

perl -F"[\s/]" -lane 'print "[ $F[0] ] [ $F[1] ] [ $F[2] ] [ $F[3] ]"' m

is "easier" although neither solution is easy if you don't know the
respective language :-) In either case, all the brackets that Mark threw in
make the solution a little less readable for those who don't know the
languages .


Regards,


Niall