Replacing string using awk

gregarion · 01-19-2010, 03:55 AM

Hey guys, i have a string of information displayed in this way :

Code:

John:king:20:34:60

what i am tring to do is to read in input which is given by the user and change it to the correct string , which is $2.

I came up with a coding like this :

Code:

awk -F: -OFS: '{ $1 = "text" ; print}' database.txt > newdatabase.text

\

what it suppose to do is to read "$1" and replace it with the word text and then print the new rows out into the new database.text file.
did i get the syntax wrong? could somebody help me with this?

gregarion · 01-19-2010, 04:15 AM

alright guys, i got the answer to it!

Code:

awk  '{ $1 = "'$edd'" ; print $0 }' fruittemp > fruittemp2

devnull10 · 01-19-2010, 04:56 AM

I know you have this working, but just for info, sed is generally used for string replacement such as this.

ghostdog74 · 01-19-2010, 11:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by devnull10

I know you have this working, but just for info, sed is generally used for string replacement such as this.

yes it does, but the data can be broken down into fields with a distinct field delimiter. The better approach is not regex.