Shell Programming and Scripting

I have the following script that will print column 4 ("25") when column 1 contains "123". However, I need to ignore the alpha characters that are contained in the input file. If I were to ignore the characters my output would be column 3.

What is the best way to print my column of interest while ignoring the alpha characters?

Code:

 awk '$1 ~/123/ {print $1, $4}' input

INPUT

Code:

W000123    0T  W   25  W    5  W   13  W    0  W    0T W    0  W    0  W    0  W    0  W    0T W    0T W   66  W   48  W    0  W
W000345   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

EXPECTED OUTPUT

Code:

W000123    25

I do not see your logic clearly. But. What if we remove all alphas and go from there.

Code:

 awk '{
    a=$0
      gsub(/[A-Z]/, " ", a)
      split(a,arr," ")
      }
      arr[1] ~ /123/ i{print $1 , arr[3]}
     ' Somefile > newfile

If you're just trying to print fields 1 and 4 if field 1 contains the string 123 anywhere in the field, I don't see why your current code above would not work.

If what you want is to print fields 1 and 4 only if field 1 starts with one or more uppercase alphabetic characters followed by zero or more zeros followed by the string 123 at the end of the field, you could try something more like:

Code:

awk '$1 ~ /^[[:upper:]]+0*123$/{print $1, $4}' input

or if you want a tab between fields in the output (which seems closer to the output you said you want):

Code:

awk '$1 ~ /^[[:upper:]]+0*123$/{print $1 "\t" $4}' input

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