Should I use cut or awk to extract fields and field substrings?

sed awk field cut text-parsing

user3486154 · Apr 1, 2014 · Viewed 11.9k times · Source

I have a file with pipe-separated fields. I want to print a subset of field 1 and all of field 2:

cat tmpfile.txt

# 10 chars.|variable length num|text
ABCDEFGHIJ|99|U|HOMEWORK
JIDVESDFXW|8|C|CHORES
DDFEXFEWEW|73|B|AFTER-HOURS

I'd like the output to look like this:

# 6 chars.|variable length num
ABCDEF|99
JIDVES|8
DDFEXF|73

I know how to get fields 1 & 2:

cat tmpfile.txt | awk '{FS="|"} {print $1"|"$2}'

And know how to get the first 6 characters of field 1:

cat tmpfile.txt | cut -c 1-6

I know this is fairly simple, but I can't figure out is how to combine the awk and cut commands.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer

You could use awk. Use the substr() function to trim the first field:

awk -F'|' '{print substr($1,1,6),$2}' OFS='|' inputfile

For your input, it'd produce:

ABCDEF|99
JIDVES|8
DDFEXF|73

Using sed, you could say:

sed -r 's/^(.{6})[^|]*([|][^|]*).*/\1\2/' inputfile

to produce the same output.