Awk Text Split and Delimit Examples – POFTUT

Awk Text Split and Delimit Examples

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Awk provides a lot of functions to manipulate, change, split etc. We will look how to split text with awk with different examples. For a general awk tutorial please look following tutorial.

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Split Syntax

Awk provides the split function in order to create array according to given delimiter. split function syntax is like below.

split(SOURCE,DESTINATION,DELIMITER)
  • SOURCE is the text we will parse
  • DESTINATION is the variable where parsed values will be put
  • DELIMITER is the sign which will delimit

Default Delimiter – Space

The delimiter is optional. So there is a default delimiter which is space. If we do not provide any delimiter space will be used as delimiter. In this example we parse 12 13 14 .

$ echo "12 23 11" | awk '{split($0,a); print a[3]; print a[2]; print a[1]}'
Default Delimiter
Default Delimiter

Provide Separator

Now we generally need to provide different delimiters. We can provide delimiter as third parameter. In this example we will specify the : as delimiter.

$ echo "12:23:11" | awk '{split($0,a,":"); print a[3]; print a[2]; print a[1]}'
Provide Separator
Provide Separator

Use Comma As Separator

In this example we will use comma as delimiter.

$ echo "12,23,11" | awk '{split($0,a,","); print a[3]; print a[2]; print a[1]}'
Use Comma As Separator
Use Comma As Separator

Use Pipe As Separator

In this example we will use pipe as delimiter.

$ echo "12|23|11" | awk '{split($0,a,"|"); print a[3]; print a[2]; print a[1]}'
Use Pipe As Separator
Use Pipe As Separator

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3 thoughts on “Awk Text Split and Delimit Examples”

    • Awk organizes data into records (which are, by default, lines) and subdivides records into fields (by default separated by spaces or maybe white space (can’t remember)). $0 is a variable which contains the entire current record (usually whatever line it’s operating on).

      It’s kind of odd to use $0 as an example for split, because awk already does that, so you could actually skip the split command and just use $3, $2, $1 (variables which automatically represent the third, second, and first fields, respectively). Split is a lot better for splitting fields into sub-fields.

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  2. Good tutorial to get started on splits in awk. Just for completeness, it possible to split on more than one delimiter. For example:

    echo “12|23-11[15” | awk ‘{split($0,a,/[[|-]/); print a[3]; print a[2]; print a[1]; print a[4]}’
    11
    23
    12
    15

    Here you put all the characters within the regex [] like this: /[[|-]/ (the characters are [, |, and – and they are enclosed in []).

    Also, unless you want the output to be printed on multiple lines, you can skip the multiple print statements and just go print a[1], a[2], a[3] ….

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