Awk Field Separators

[Mark Harrison]

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.

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 at necssd.NEC.COM
(214)518-5050             {necntc, cs.utexas.edu}!necssd!harrison
standard disclaimers apply...