awk print $1 escape all special characters

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I'm using awk '{print $1}' and it works most of the time to print the contents of a mysql query loop, but occationally I get a field with some special character in it, is there a way to tell awk to ignore all special characters between my FS? I have >186K records, so building a list of ALL special characters might be tough, though I've only noticed ' and ) so far. the FS is a , .

2

a sample 'special' record (or 2) would help.
also a desired output, please.

3

input:

San Jose, 5101, US
Hawk's Crossing, 3421, NZ
Westfork), vn322, RU

output:

loop1
a=San Jose
b=5101
c=US

loop2
a=Hawk's Crossing
b=3421
c=NZ

loop3
a=Westfork)
b=Vn322
c=RU
4 
nawk '
  BEGIN {
    FS=","
    split("a,b,c,d,e", a, FS)
  }
  {
    for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)
      printf("%s%s%s", (i==1)?"loop"++loop ORS:"", a"="$i, (i==NF)?ORS ORS:ORS)
  }' inputFile
5

Is it possible to explain a little of what's happening in your script, I'm trying to extend my awk knowledge a little bit? I could hack it and make it work, but I want to understand it.

6

Or:

awk -F", " '{print "loop" ++i RS "a=" $1 RS "b=" $2 RS "c=" $3 RS}' file
7

well, it's not awk,
but in perl you can,

$ perl -ne 'chomp;print "\Q$_\E\n"'  file

which escapes all but [A-Z][a-z_]