Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!aplcen!haven!grebyn!macom1!larry
From: larry@macom1.UUCP (Larry Taborek)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: AWK Question
Message-ID: <4939@macom1.UUCP>
Date: 9 Oct 89 11:47:47 GMT
References: <281@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: CENTEL Federal Systems, Reston, VA. 22091-1506
Lines: 42

From article <281@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu>, by frank@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Frank G. Fiamingo):
> My problem is that I want to check a particular character
> position in a record to see whether or not it is a blank.
> If so, I want to change it to a zero.  I thought I could
> do this with an awk script similar to the one below, but have
> had no success.
> 
> BEGIN {FS=""}
> {split($0,array);
> if (array[28] == " ") {array[28] = 0};
> for(i in array) print array[$1]}
> 
> However, it appears that split is only recognizing 2 fields
> in the record, rather than the 35 characters that it contains.
> Can anyone tell me where I've gone wrong, or a better way
> to do this?

Frank,

Why use split at all?  If $0 contains the entire record, and if
you have fixed position data (as array[28] suggests) then why not
just check $0[28]?

{
FS=""
array=$0
if (array[28] == " ") array[28] ="0"
print array
}

I had to assign $0 to some variable as I wanted to change it.
Awk complains if you try to change $fields directly.  You can
also remove the FS="" statement, as we are working off $0 then
any fields that awk derives are of no consequence to this code.

Hope this helps...

-- 
Larry Taborek	..!uunet!grebyn!macom1!larry	Centel Federal Systems
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