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

Have you tried:

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

I do not like the echo "..." | awk ... solution as it calls unnecessary fork and execsystem calls.

I prefer a Dimitre's solution with a little twist

awk -F\| '{print $3 $2 $1}' <<<'12|23|11'

Or a bit shorter version:

awk -F\| '$0=$3 $2 $1' <<<'12|23|11'

In this case the output record put together which is a true condition, so it gets printed.

In this specific case the stdin redirection can be spared with setting an awk internal variable:

awk -v T='12|23|11' 'BEGIN{split(T,a,"|");print a[3] a[2] a[1]}'

I used ksh quite a while, but in bash this could be managed by internal string manipulation. In the first case the original string is split by internal terminator. In the second case it is assumed that the string always contains digit pairs separated by a one character separator.

T='12|23|11';echo -n ${T##*|};T=${T%|*};echo ${T#*|}${T%|*}
T='12|23|11';echo ${T:6}${T:3:2}${T:0:2}

The result in all cases is

112312

Answer 4

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

should work.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

I know this is kind of old question, but I thought maybe someone like my trick. Especially since this solution not limited to a specific number of items.

# Convert to an array
_ITEMS=($(echo "12|23|11" | tr '|' '\n'))

# Output array items
for _ITEM in "${_ITEMS[@]}"; do
  echo "Item: ${_ITEM}"
done

The output will be:

Item: 12
Item: 23
Item: 11