hi,

i'm writing an AWK script in which i need to convert one of my data field to total seconds. the data field is written in the file as
i know how to convert a single day, the year, the hour, and the minutes. what i don't know how to convert to seconds is the month because that changes the number of Days.

thanks for your help!

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1112...awk-to-seconds
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...o-epoch-in-awk

got it, thanks

so i'm back to this problem again. i didn't have it solved like i thought i did. it is tougher than i thought. the time string gets read when running a bigger piece of the code. here's my example code, and the time string that i need to convert is "30-April-2024 12:01:29.7613" really i only need to convert the 12:01:29.7613 to seconds
so for the time field if i just say time == $3 i get "30-April-2024
and if i say time == $4 i get 12:01:29.7613" which has both the : and a " as part of the string.
i also tried mktime but that just gets me -1
once 12:01:29.7613" is broken down into it's hours, minutes, seconds pieces i can do the math to get total number of seconds, i just don't know how to break it down.

In this example better to use FS=" = " (space, equal, space)

good morning pan, the indexing works out fine when it's left as FS =" " not so good when it's FS=" = "
and that doesn't help me parse out the "30-April-2024 12:01:29.7613" time
but thanks for your idea

Something like the following without the quotes?
12:01:29.7613

What does it mean? Probably you need to use $2 instead of $3. Or $NF

michaelk,

using your thought i tried
kind of like using a function, of course that didn't work

pan, the script works fine (parsing out lots of fields) except for parsing out the time field, which has the : and the " There is no need to change the Field Separator to something other than what it is, that would mess-up the rest of the script

That is wrong. Your problem is that the field separator splits that time value into different parts. If you want to solve it you need to change the field separator. Or make an ugly workaround, like time = $4 + $5 or something similar. But anyway, you need to decide if you want to split it or not, you cannot do both in the same time.
You can also re-evaluate/re-split $0 if $1 = time.

ok pan i see your reasoning, thank you! so i used your FS=" = " field separator and renumbered all the $3 to $2 and i can get the same output for all the non-time fields that i got before AND now for the time field which is $2 i get no quotes

this is one step closer

so now i just need to throw away the DD-MM-YYYY which somehow i should be able to key off of the space and then break the time array into seconds. i would think something like what michaelk was suggesting would work, but i don't know the right syntax

isn't quite right

probably this helps: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...n-array-in-awk