Assuming there's no backreference (e.g. &) or escape chars in the prefix string you want to add:
$ awk -F';' 'NR==1{add=$2":"; FS=" "; next} {gsub(/(^|;)/,"&"add,$3); print $3}' file
GYPA:20
GYPA:1;GYPA:42;GYPA:53
GYPA:24;GYPA:12
I have the following text file:
$ cat file.txt
# file;GYPA;Boston
Josh 81-62 20
Mike 72-27 1;42;53
Allie 71-27 24;12
I would like to add GYPA to every element of the third column in the following manner:
GYPA:20
GYPA:1;GYPA:42;GYPA:53
GYPA:24;GYPA:12
so far, I have
cat combine.awk
NR==1 {
FS=";"; Add=$2
}
{
FS="\t"; split($3,a,";");
for (i in a) {
print Add":"a[i]
}
}
the array part did not work.
Assuming there's no backreference (e.g. &) or escape chars in the prefix string you want to add:
$ awk -F';' 'NR==1{add=$2":"; FS=" "; next} {gsub(/(^|;)/,"&"add,$3); print $3}' file
GYPA:20
GYPA:1;GYPA:42;GYPA:53
GYPA:24;GYPA:12
"&"now that was a nugget I didn't knowawkcould behave likesedwith... Thank you.Can you please explain what are the
"s around the&for? My understanding is that&is either the empty string (when^matches the beginning of$3) or;;addis the second header followed by:. But why those two"s?The 2nd argument to
gsub()is a string."&"andis the string you get when you concatenate the string"&"with the value of the variableand. The"s are just string delimiters -&alone would be an awk language symbol while"&"is a string containing the character&which means a backreference for the entire matching string from the 1st arg in the context of the 2nd arg to gsub().In every way,
&is not an awk variable - on it's own as&it's a symbol and within"&"its a character in a string. Yes,addis an awk variable.Not sure what you're trying to do there.
^.meansany character at the start of a string- it seems unlikely you want to replace that with anything. Please ask a new question with it's own sample input/output if you'd like help.