Unable to separate semi-colon separated line awk

Question

I am trying to do the following:

1. Read a file line by line.
2. Each line has the following structure: field1;field2;field3
3. Use

Answer 1

Why awk when you can do it in pure bash?

while IFS=';' read -r field1 field2 field3; do
    echo "Field1: $field1"
    echo "Field2: $field2"
    echo "Field3: $field3"
done < file.txt

Or if you don't know the field count:

while IFS=';' read -ra fields; do        
    echo "Number of fields: ${#fields[@]}"
    echo "Field1 ${fields[0]}"
done < file.txt

Answer 2

Your awk has no idea what --field-separator=";" means so when you do this:

awk --field-separator=";" '{print $1}'

your awk is still using the default FS of a space, and so $1 contains your whole input line while $2 and $3 are empty. Use -F';' to set the FS.

You are WAY, WAY off the mark in how to write the script you want. If you tell us more about what "process each field" is, we can help you.

Answer 3

It's probably a bug with your awk. Try other formats like these:

while read l
do
    n=`echo "${l}" | awk -F\; '{print NF}'`
    field1=`echo "${l}" | awk -F\; '{print $1}'`
    field2=`echo "${l}" | awk -F\; '{print $2}'`
    field3=`echo "${l}" | awk -F\; '{print $3}'`
    echo "${n} ${field1} ${field2} ${field3}"
done < temp 

Or

while read l
do
    n=`echo "${l}" | awk -v 'FS=;' '{print NF}'`
    field1=`echo "${l}" | awk -v 'FS=;' '{print $1}'`
    field2=`echo "${l}" | awk -v 'FS=;' '{print $2}'`
    field3=`echo "${l}" | awk -v 'FS=;' '{print $3}'`
    echo "${n} ${field1} ${field2} ${field3}"
done < temp 

Or

while read l
do
    n=`echo "${l}" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=";"}{print NF}'`
    field1=`echo "${l}" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=";"}{print $1}'`
    field2=`echo "${l}" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=";"}{print $2}'`
    field3=`echo "${l}" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=";"}{print $3}'`
    echo "${n} ${field1} ${field2} ${field3}"
done < temp 

Try other awks like mawk or nawk as well.