Awk Field Separators

[Greg, Ext. 3414]

In article <3729 at se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>, cubbage at 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.
> 
> Any hints?

I haven't found any way to do it either.  The manual says it only accepts a
single character.  You might try getting a copy of GAWK (Gnu Awk).  GAWK allows
regular expressions for the FS variable. For example:
   awk 'BEGIN {FS="[ |]"} {print NF}' input.dat
gives a result of 6 for the data above.  Awk, however, gives 1 as a result.

It's worth checking out.

Greg Wright <wrightgr at mwk>
            uucp: uhnix1!mwk!wrightgr  So they tell me.  We just got a new feed
                                       so I don't know for sure.