Hello Unix.com !

Newbie question.
With awk, i can we give a particular letter a number without printing the number?

input:

X|X
A|X
A|A
X|A

X|X|9
A|X|6
A|A|4
X|A|6

BEGIN{FS=OFS="|"}
{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
	   if($i ~ /A/){
	       $i = "2"}
	   else
	       $i = "3"
	   
	   $3 = $1 * $2
}1

3|3|9
2|3|6
2|2|4
3|2|6

$ nawk -F\| -v OFS=\| 'BEGIN{a["X"]=3;a["A"]=2}{x=1;for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){x*=a[$i]}$NF=$NF FS x}1' input.txt
X|X|X|27
A|X|X|18
A|A|X|12
A|A|A|8
X|A|X|18

That's because you are changing the fields in the loop instead of using values associated with those fields. Try this instead:

awk 'BEGIN{OFS=FS="|";val["A"]=2;val["X"]=3} {$3=val[$1]*val[$3]}1' inputfile

Thanks itkamaraj and elixir_sinari for your quick replies !

I'm just curious, but what if for example we have also some fields with different letters (or even strings) and we want to assign them specific values.

e.g.

X|X|X
A|B|X
A|C|X
A|B|C
X|B|C

for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
    if ($i = "X"){
        <then assign X the value 3>
    else
       < assign the values different of X the value 2>
...

awk -F\| -v OFS=\| '{x=1;for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)if($i=="X"){x*=3}else{x*=2}$NF=$NF FS x}1' input.txt

My point is that we cannot use something like:

BEGIN{OFS=FS="|";val["X"]=3;val[^"X"]=2}
...

awk 'BEGIN{OFS=FS="|"} {$3=($1=="X"?3:2)*($2=="X"?3:2)}1' inputfile