I'm very happy that you got this to work for you.

But, please stop trying to hide the logic in your code! Make it obvious. Change:

Code:

$0 ~ vkeyIn, $0 ~ vkeyOut { WRK = WRK $0; next; }END{

	$0 = WRK

to:

Code:

$0 ~ vkeyIn, $0 ~ vkeyOut { WRK = WRK $0; next}

END {
	$0 = WRK

It isn't immediately obvious what isn't working in this example and you don't give us any indication of what you think it is doing wrong.

The call to split() could be rewritten more simply as:

Code:

split("<orth> "vkeySepA, VNARR)

and always give you identical results. Given that vkeySepA has been defined to be an empty string in your earlier code and assuming that it still is when you ran this, one might note that the call above would return 1 (not the 2 that you seem to be assuming). But since unassigned array elements (like any other unassigned variables) will have a 0 value if used as a number or an empty string value if used as a string, that won't make any difference in this case. Your calls to sub() with those array values should change the first occurrence of the string <orth> in $0 to an empty string.

Note that the <space> after <orth> will be treated as a field separator, not as part of the string to be replaced. Note also that with many of your search patterns (many of which contain <space>s) and replacement patterns (many of which contain <space>s), using code like the above will give you more than 2 fields in the created array unless you use a different array element separator and add an ERE to your split() call specifying the character(s) in your separator as the element separator.