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Reusing regular expression groups with awk
General programming in Awk
Regular expression groups is stuff matched in brackets, eg /some([^:]+):here
.*)/
awk, in general, cannot use or reuse those. They are normally processed as a match.
The only way to accomplish this (besides alternative techniques), is using gawk's gensub() and match() function
match() is extended by an optional third argument, a destination array in which the groups will get stored
gensub() is kindof an advanced g/sub() returning the new string. The group is specified by \\<number> in its second argument, \\0 represents the whole match, as does &. Its third argument indicates which match to actually replace, or "g" for all. Note on where .* is wanted/needed.
Note, awk does not support look-(ahead|behind), or any (<modifier><regex>) classes as PCRE or other advanced (standarized partly) libraries do, not even {<number>} counted matches, excepts gawk with --re-interval
# btw, my prompt looks like this: xmb ([color red]gp[/color]:[color yellow]4[/color]:[color green]3[/color])~/awk $
# PS1='\u (\[\e[1;31m\]\h\[\e[m\]:\[\e[33m\]\l\[\e[m\]:\[\e[32m\]\j\[\e[m\])\[\e[1m\]\w\[\e[m\] \$ '
Examples:
; [ng tag]
.*)/awk, in general, cannot use or reuse those. They are normally processed as a match.
The only way to accomplish this (besides alternative techniques), is using gawk's gensub() and match() function
match() is extended by an optional third argument, a destination array in which the groups will get stored
gensub() is kindof an advanced g/sub() returning the new string. The group is specified by \\<number> in its second argument, \\0 represents the whole match, as does &. Its third argument indicates which match to actually replace, or "g" for all. Note on where .* is wanted/needed.
Note, awk does not support look-(ahead|behind), or any (<modifier><regex>) classes as PCRE or other advanced (standarized partly) libraries do, not even {<number>} counted matches, excepts gawk with --re-interval
# btw, my prompt looks like this: xmb ([color red]gp[/color]:[color yellow]4[/color]:[color green]3[/color])~/awk $
# PS1='\u (\[\e[1;31m\]\h\[\e[m\]:\[\e[33m\]\l\[\e[m\]:\[\e[32m\]\j\[\e[m\])\[\e[1m\]\w\[\e[m\] \$ '
Examples:
Code:
$ echo 'From: "Sumone @home" <home@me.com>
From: malformed <doh>' |
gawk '{ print gensub(/.*:[ "]+([^"]+| *<).*<([^>]+).*/, "\\1 -+- \\2", 1) }'
[b]Sumone @home -+- home@me.com
malformed -+- doh[/b]
Code:
$ echo XabF XcdF XdeF | gawk '{ print gensub(/X([^X]+)F/, "\\1", 2) }'
[b]XabF cd XdeF[/b]
$ echo XabF XcdF XdeF | gawk '{ print gensub(/X([^X]+)F/, "\\1", "g") }'
[b]ab cd de[/b]
Code:
$ echo "<html><head><blah foo=bar>yeah<..>" | gawk '{
match($0, /head><([^ ]+) ([^=]+)=([^>]+)>([^<]+)/, Arr)
printf "%s (%s->%s) == %s\n", Arr[1], Arr[2], Arr[3], Arr[4]
}'
[b]blah (foo->bar) == yeah[/b]; [ng tag]