Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi there,

say I have a line with multiple columns but with different separation formats: spaces, tabs..

Is it possible to have AWK print the separation format between each column?

If you supply any other means to identify columns and/or tell them from each other.

Thank you, but I dont think I got your point

You didn't supply any way for a program looking at your input file to determine whether a one or more spaces or one or more tabs found in a line in that input file is supposed to be interpreted as a field separator or as data within a field. And since you said the separation formats include spaces, tabs, ...; we don't know whether any given character in the input file is a field separator or data.

If you can't explicitly explain the difference between data and field separators in your input, there is nothing we can do to help you write an awk script that will determine the format for you.

Ok, thank you. The file looks like this:

Code:

ABCD      A  L     BBB J HHH     9495994 4458902  HJFGGJK  SDFR 22222

Can awk determine which are the separators between ABCD and A, or between BBB and J?

Based on the assumption your file contains only upper case chars and digits, this would yield all separators used:

Code:

awk '{gsub(/[A-Z0-9]/,"");for (i=1; i<=length; i++) C[substr($0,i,1)]++} END {for (c in C) print c}' file

Thank you RudiC. I tried it but the output is nothing, which I dont think is wrong. The answer is there, its just that whether the answer are spaces or tabs, these are not being printed as " " or "t". In other words, for the file

Code:

ABCD    A   L

which is ABCDtabAspacespacespaceL

I would expect awk to print these separators, something like:

Code:

awk_command
output:
t "   "