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From: adb@cs.bu.edu (Adam Bryant)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Awk Field Separators
Message-ID: <ADB.90Aug25172109@cs.bu.edu>
Date: 25 Aug 90 21:21:09 GMT
References: <3729@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <3353@mwk.uucp>
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Distribution: comp.unix.questions
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In-reply-to: wrightgr@mwk.uucp's message of 24 Aug 90 08:25:53 GMT

In article <3353@mwk.uucp> wrightgr@mwk.uucp (Greg, Ext. 3414) writes:
+  Does anybody know how to specify more than one field separator in Awk?
+  I would like to specify to an Awk program to treat single spaces as well
+  as bars as field separators so that a string such as :
+  
+  12 12 12 34|34|34
+  
+  will be said to have 6 fields.  I've tried to create a regular expression
+  to handle both cases but it hasn't been working.

I use the split() command when handling multiple field separators.

Code to print a list of fields separated by a ' ' or a '|' is:

{
     for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) {
	num = split($i, nstr, "|");
	for (j = 1; j <= num; j++) {
		print( nstr[j] )
	}
     }
}

Hope this helps.

adam bryant