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Full Discussion: awk to print column number while ignoring alpha characters
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting awk to print column number while ignoring alpha characters Post 302973049 by ncwxpanther on Friday 13th of May 2016 02:17:47 PM
Old 05-13-2016
Thanks for the responses guys.

To be more clear:

I need to be able to print the contents of a specified column, while ignoring the alpha characters. In this case the "W" and "T". However, for those instances where "T" occurs, there is a numeric character which needs to be preserved. So the "0" needs to stay.

When we count the columns from left to right, we are not counting the columns with "W". In my example, the line that contains "123" would have 16 columns. I need to print just column 3. So my desired output would be 25.

I could make this a 2 step process, eliminating the alpha characters first, then count the columns, but was hoping for a simple 1 liner.

Thanks

---------- Post updated at 02:17 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:37 AM ----------

I was able to utilize this script to extract out a single column of data. But what if i wanted multiple columns? Say columns 3, 4 and 5

Script
Code:
awk '{ a=$0 gsub(/[A-Z]/, " ", a)split(a,arr," ");print arr[1] , arr[3]} ' input.txt | awk '$1 ~/201604/'

Input
Code:
00013743201604  13  W   25  W    0T W   18  W    0T W    0  W  178  W    0  W   43  W    0  W    3  W   13  W    0  W    0  W    0  W    0  W    0  W    0

Output

Code:
00013743201604 25


Desired Output for Multiple Columns
Code:
00013743201604 25
00013743201604 0
00013743201604 18

 

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LEARN ABOUT OPENDARWIN

column

COLUMN(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						 COLUMN(1)

NAME

     column -- columnate lists

SYNOPSIS

     column [-tx] [-c columns] [-s sep] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

     The column utility formats its input into multiple columns.  Rows are filled before columns.  Input is taken from file operands, or, by
     default, from the standard input.	Empty lines are ignored.

     The options are as follows:

     -c      Output is formatted for a display columns wide.

     -s      Specify a set of characters to be used to delimit columns for the -t option.

     -t      Determine the number of columns the input contains and create a table.  Columns are delimited with whitespace, by default, or with
	     the characters supplied using the -s option.  Useful for pretty-printing displays.

     -x      Fill columns before filling rows.

DIAGNOSTICS

     The column utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

ENVIRONMENT

     COLUMNS  The environment variable COLUMNS is used to determine the size of the screen if no other information is available.

EXAMPLES

	   (printf "PERM LINKS OWNER GROUP SIZE MONTH DAY " ; 
	   printf "HH:MM/YEAR NAME
" ; 
	   ls -l | sed 1d) | column -t

SEE ALSO

     colrm(1), ls(1), paste(1), sort(1)

HISTORY

     The column command appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno.

BSD
								   June 6, 1993 							       BSD
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