How to use word boundaries in awk without using match() function?

Question

I want to add word boundaries to this awk command:

awk \'{$0=tolower($0)};/wordA/&&/wordB/ { print FILENAME \":\" $0; }\' myfile.txt

Answer 1

1. GNU awk also supports the \< and \> conventions for word boundaries.
2. On a Mac, /usr/bin/awk version 20070501 does not support [[:<:]] or [[:>:]]

3. If you're stuck with a recalcitrant awk, then since awk is normally splitting lines into tokens anyway, it might make sense to use:

   function word(s, i) { for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {if ($i ~ "^" s "$") {return i}}; return 0; }

So, for example, instead of writing

/\<[abc]\>/ { print "matched"; }

you could just as easily write:

word("[abc]") { print "matched"; }