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My file looks like this
abc ||| xyz ||| foo bar hello world ||| spam ham jam ||| blah blah I want to extract a specific column, e.g. I could have done:
sed 's/\s|||\s/\\t/g' file | cut -f1 But is there another way of doing that?
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When using MS Excel's Text to column feature, you can tell Excel what to use as a delimiter in order to split text into columns. The one problem is that for the custom delimiter you are only allowed to enter 1 character.
The AWK Field Separator (FS) is used to specify and control how AWK splits a record into various fields. Also, it can accept a single character of a regular expression. Once you specify a regular expression as the value for the FS, AWK scans the input values for the sequence of characters set in the regular expression.
Unix Cut by a delimiter The tab character is the default delimiter for cut command. and "-f" option is used to cut by a delimiter. You can override delimiter by providing the "-d" option. Following UNIX or Linux cut command example will show you how to split a line by delimiter in UNIX.
Since | is a valid regex expression, it needs to be escaped with \\| or put in square brackets: [|].
You can do this:
awk -F' \\|\\|\\| ' '{print $1}' file Some other variations that work as well:
awk -F' [|][|][|] ' '{print "$1"}' file awk -F' [|]{3} ' '{print "$1"}' file awk -F' \\|{3} ' '{print "$1"}' file awk -F' \\|+ ' '{print "$1"}' file awk -F' [|]+ ' '{print "$1"}' file
\as separator does not work well in square brackets, only escaping, and many escape chars :)
cat file abc \\\ xyz \\\ foo bar Example: 4 \ for every \ in the expression, so 12 \ in total.
awk -F' \\\\\\\\\\\\ ' '{print $2}' file xyz or
awk -F' \\\\{3} ' '{print $2}' file xyz or this but it's not much simpler
awk -F' [\\\\]{3} ' '{print $2}' file xyz awk -F' [\\\\][\\\\][\\\\] ' '{print $2}' file xyz If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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