shawn_w on Parsing JSON in Forty Lines of Awk

Comment on Parsing JSON in Forty Lines of Awk parent

As long as you don't mind the extra space in the middle.

Often times I don't! Entirely depends on what I'm doing. #1 thing off the top of my head is to remove That One Column that's a bajillion characters long that makes exploratory analysis difficult.

saghm 1y

I wonder if it's possible to encode the backspace character in the replacement string?

ZoomZoomZoom 1y

No problem, there's \b.

  echo "one two three four five" | awk '{$3="\b"; print}'

Inserts the backspace character (^H), which you can then remove with [global] substitution:

  awk '{$3="\b"; sub(/\32\b/, ""); print}'

You can, of course, use an arbitrary sentinel value for the field to be deleted. Should work in gawk and BWK awk.

fragmede 1y

if you do:

    sed 's/  / /g'

lucb1e 1y

Or sticking with awk, I have this bash alias to remove excess whitespace that is just:

    awk '{$1=$1};1'

fuzztester 1y

what does the 1 at the end do? make awk print all lines? I'm a bit rusty with my awk.

thrwwy9234 1y

It’s a condition. 1 is true-ish, so it’s a condition that is always true. The default action in awk is print, so it’s the same as:

  '{$1=$1}1{print}'

Or the same as

  '{$1=$1}{print}'

Since the default condition is true. But 1 is shorter than {print}.

Comments