Ignore delimiter within a column

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

So I was trying this awk snippet

awk -F, '$1 ~ /Match/' File

This is my sample file output

Name,Age,Nationality,Description
Jack,20,American,Tall, caucasian, lean
Mary,30,British,Short,white,slim

I would expect expected Output to be, when a certain match is met say $1 is equal to Jack

Name Age Nationality Description
Jack 20 American Tall, caucasian, lean

But as you can tell, because of delimiter "," it delimits the description output as below

Name Age Nationality Description
Jack 20 American Tall caucasian lean

Throwing results out of columns boundary.

Any idea how to have a workaround of this?

2

Here is one solution:

awk -F, '{if (NR==1) {gsub(","," ",$0); print $0} else {if ($1 ~ /Jack/) {print $1,$2,substr($0,length($1)+length($2)+3,length($0))}}}' File

Name Age Nationality Description
Jack 20 American,Tall, caucasian, lean
3

If you want to display the description without fixing commas inconsistency among records:

awk -F, '$1 ~ /Jack|Mary/ {match($0, $4); print $1,$2,$3, substr($0, RSTART)}' file 

Jack 20 American Tall, caucasian, lean
Mary 30 British Short,white,slim

If you want to fix the commas inconsistency of descriptions

awk -F, '$1 ~ /Jack|Mary/ {match($0, $4); d = substr($0, RSTART); gsub(/(,|, )/, ", ", d); print $1,$2,$3, d}' file 

Jack 20 American Tall, caucasian, lean
Mary 30 British Short, white, slim