can awk built-in "match" be exact??

farphe · #1 (**permalink**) 01-14-2009

hello everybody,

as explained in the title, here is what I want:

str1="name1 name2 name3"
str2="name1"
str3="name"

I know that match(str1,str2) will return 1, but I want that match(str1,str3) returns 0 (when it also returns 1...)

Is there a way to get that exact matching process done in a awk script??

cheers,
Tanguy

otheus · #2 (**permalink**) 01-14-2009

What do you mean by "exact"? str2 and str3 are both found in str1, but neither is an exact match.

farphe · #3 (**permalink**) 01-14-2009

good point otheus...

well by that I mean that I'd like to compare each "field" of str1 (all fields being separated by a coma) and test if they match str3 (exactly). So basically I want to compare name1 to name, then name2 to name, then name3 to name... and check if they are exactly the same (in which case name1 compared to name is a false)

hum... not so clear, is it?
But maybe I'm simply not doing things the easier way...

otheus · #4 (**permalink**) 01-14-2009

It's clear now. Can you use "nawk" or GNU awk (gawk)?

farphe · #5 (**permalink**) 01-14-2009

yes I can use gawk if it makes things easier

otheus · #6 (**permalink**) 01-14-2009

First, use the split() function to split up the "str1" into an array. Then, search the array using "==". So:

Code:

split(str1,ary,",");
for (s in ary) 
  if (s == str2 || s == str3) { found=s; break; }
print found

farphe · #7 (**permalink**) 01-14-2009

excellent!

I had already tried that "split" thing in a couple of less elegant ways and with no success, so many thanks for that ;-)

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