Trim white spaces using awk

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have a CSV file with footer information as below. The third value is the number of records in the file. Sometimes it contains both leading and trailing white spaces which i want to trim using awk.

C,FOOTER , 00000642
C,FOOTER , 00000707
C, FOOTER, 42
C, FOOTER, 129

eval `awk -F,  ' /FOOTER/ {print "set RecordsFound=" $3} 
/HEADER/ { print "set FileBusinessDate=" $4} END{ print "set ActualRecords=" NR-2 }  ' ${SourceDir}/${FileCsv} `

Above is the command which is already present in production and this statement fails since the $3 has spaces in it. So far we didn't get any spaces in the CSV, so this statement was working fine for the past 1 year.

Is there any way to trim the spaces(both leading and trailing spaces) in AWK?

I tried gsub(/ /,"",$3) but it doesn't work

Any help is much appreciated

Thanks in Advance
Mohana

2

Your statement is valid for one space, insert it in your AWK program :

/FOOTER/ {gsub(/ /,"",$3); print "set RecordsFound=" $3}

To suppress multiple spaces :

/FOOTER/ {gsub(/ */,"",$3); print "set RecordsFound=" $3}

Perhaps your field contains tabulation, modify the gsub statement :

/FOOTER/ {gsub(/[[:space:]]*/,"",$3); print "set RecordsFound=" $3}

jean-Pierre.

3

Thank you. It works :slight_smile: