How to split a delimited string into an array in awk?

Question

How to split the string when it contains pipe symbols | in it. I want to split them to be in array.

I tried

echo \"12:23:11\" | awk \'{s         


        

Answer 1

Please be more specific! What do you mean by "it doesn't work"? Post the exact output (or error message), your OS and awk version:

% awk -F\| '{
  for (i = 0; ++i <= NF;)
    print i, $i
  }' <<<'12|23|11'
1 12
2 23
3 11

Or, using split:

% awk '{
  n = split($0, t, "|")
  for (i = 0; ++i <= n;)
    print i, t[i]
  }' <<<'12|23|11'
1 12
2 23
3 11

Edit: on Solaris you'll need to use the POSIX awk (/usr/xpg4/bin/awk) in order to process 4000 fields correctly.