Awk string replacement

Question

I need to split a csv string into an array, and cut the content of its elements to a lngth or 300 if the element's content exceed the 300 characters. I'm very close to it but for some reason that i cant figure out, this is not working:

awk '{split($0,fields,",") 
 for(field in fields)
    if(length(fields[field]) >300){
     gsub(fields[field],substr(fields[field],0,300),$0)
   } print 
 }' file_in.csv > file_out

I can see it when i run this test:

awk '{split($0,fields,","); for(field in fields) if(length(fields[field]) >=301){print fields[field]} }' file_out

This is still prnting some fields Any idea whats wrong with my awk?

It would help both you and us if you didn't use an inline script for this. It's not trivial enough. I'd save it to a file, put some newlines into it, and come back — salezica
– salezica, Commented Feb 27, 2014 at 12:16
Avoid to use gsub in such a case, because characters ? and ` are interpreted as special characters (resp. wildcard and escape next one). Instead call only substr`. — Bentoy13
– Bentoy13, Commented Feb 27, 2014 at 12:42
@JBoy Not really, you don't need to call gsub or sub... substr is enough to get the correct output. — Bentoy13
– Bentoy13, Commented Feb 27, 2014 at 12:49

mklement0 · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-27 13:15:55Z

2

You can use this awk to trim fields > 300:

awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=","} 
     {for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) if (length($i)>300) $i=substr($i,1,300)}
     1' file.csv

edited Feb 27, 2014 at 13:15

mklement0

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answered Feb 27, 2014 at 12:33

anubhava

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Raul Andres · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-27 12:30:40Z

0

I've changed 300 by 3 to do it readable:

$echo "Hello,World"| awk '{split($0, fields,",");str=""; for (field in fields){str = str substr(fields[field],0,3) ","}; print substr(str,0,length(str)-1)}'
Hel,wor

Line is a little long, splitted is:

awk '{split($0, fields,",");
      str="";
      for (field in fields){
         str = str substr(fields[field],0,3) ","
      };
      print substr(str,0,length(str)-1)}'

answered Feb 27, 2014 at 12:30

Raul Andres

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