print - for printing whole line, but delimeters are changed to spaces

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi consider the source file

R|field1|field2

using the print statement in awk prints it as

R field1 field2

Is there an easier way to print the whole line in its original format (i.e. with | delimiters) than doing print $1"|"$2"|"$3 ??

Thanks

Storms

2

The special OFS variable controls what awk's output separator is.

awk -F'|' '{ ... }' OFS='|' filename

You can even use this to transform lines with one separator into a different separator, but beware that awk won't actually alter the line until you write to the line or tokens in some way. A no-op like $1=$1 would do.

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