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From: harrison@necssd.NEC.COM (Mark Harrison)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Awk Field Separators
Summary: You need New Awk (nawk).
Message-ID: <427@necssd.NEC.COM>
Date: 28 Aug 90 18:33:56 GMT
References: <3729@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Distribution: comp.unix.questions
Organization: NEC America Inc. SSD, Irving, TX
Lines: 22

In article <3729@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>, cubbage@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM
(Sharon Cubbage) 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.

The new version of Awk (nawk) can do this, but the old version can't.

$ echo "a b,c" | nawk -F",| " '{print NF}'
3
$ echo "a b,c" | awk -F",| " '{print NF}'
2
-- 
Mark Harrison             harrison@necssd.NEC.COM
(214)518-5050             {necntc, cs.utexas.edu}!necssd!harrison
standard disclaimers apply...