multiple Field Separators in awk

Question

i have this string

-foo {{0.000 0.000} {648.0 0.000} {648.0 1980.0} {0.000 1980.0} {0.000 0.000}}

i want to separate it to numbers and iterate over them ,thanks tried to use Field separator without success how can i do it with awk?

Solution 1

Try doing this :

awk -F'}+|{+| ' '{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) if ($i ~ "[0-9]") print $i}' file.txt

The Field Separator FS (the -F switch) can be a character, a word, a regex or a class of characters.

You can use this too :

awk 'BEGIN{FS="}+|{+| "} {for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) if($i ~ "[0-9]")print $i}' file.txt

explanations

• foo|bar|base is a regex where it can match any of the strings separated by the |
• in }+|{+|, we have the choice to match a literal } at least one : +, or a literal { at least one : +, or a space.
• you can use a class of character too to do the same : [{} ], both works

Solution 2

One way with awk :

awk -F'[{} ]' '{ for( i=1; i<=NF; i++ ) if( $i ~ /[0-9.]+/ ) print $i }' file

In the line above, we went through those numbers, but I didn't do anything special, just printed them. You could add your logic to that part.

Output:

0.000
0.000
648.0
0.000
648.0
1980.0
0.000
1980.0
0.000
0.000

Solution 3

If you just want to display each number on a new line then simply use grep:

$ egrep -o '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+' file
0.000
0.000
648.0
0.000
648.0
1980.0
0.000
1980.0
0.000
0.000

Comments

[ilansh]

thanks sputnick can ypu please explain the '}+|{+| ' seperator

[Qian Chen]

@stArdustͲ I want to get either a colon or spaces as the separator, however, it seems awk -F ':| ' doesn't work. Am I missing anything? Thanks.

[Qian Chen]

I figured out the answer: awk -F ':[ \t]*|[ \t]+'. Thanks to this link: softpanorama.org/Tools/Awk/awk_regular_expressions.shtml