awk with multiple character delimiter

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

I'm trying to split fields separated by multiple characters :

Here's the string :

"toto"||"ta|ta"||"titi"

Here's what I want :

"toto"||"ta|ta"

I tried several ways, but it seems that my delimiter || is not working :

echo "\"toto\"||\"ta|ta\"||\"titi\"" | awk 'BEGIN {FS="[||]+";}{print $1"||"$2}'

"toto"||"ta

It works when there's no | in field two :

echo "\"toto\"||\"tata\"||\"titi\"" | awk 'BEGIN {FS="[||]+";}{print $1"||"$2}'

"toto"||"tata"

I don't understand why only one | is considered as a delimiter as I specified a double |...
Any help will be much appreciated !

Mat

2

Here is one way of doing it without using awk.
Note the single quote around the string:

echo '"toto"||"ta|ta"||"titi"' | cut -d'|' -f1-4
1 Like
3 
% cat infile
"toto"||"ta|ta"||"titi"
% awk -F'[|][|]' '{ print $1, $2 }' OFS='||' infile
"toto"||"ta|ta"
1 Like
4

Thx Shell_Life for this quick response.

Sorry for not being enough specific : I don't know the content of field2, and it may contain special characters. I'm just sure it does not contain "||", that's why I used it as a delimiter.

Your solution is great, but if I have another pipe in field two :

echo '"toto"||"ta|ti|a"||"titi"' | cut -d'|' -f1-4

"toto"||"ta|ti

end of field 2 is missing.

---------- Post updated at 10:49 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:46 AM ----------

wow
I don't even have time to reply...

Thx radoulov, that was exactly what I was looking for.
:b:

(sorry for code tags !)

5

first replace the multi charecter with one spl charecter.
then use that as the delimiter.

echo '"toto"||"ta|ta"||"titi"' |sed "s/$val/,/g"

regards
rajesh