Spaces in parameter

[Waspy]

There're many questions of stripping leading/trailing spaces. My problem is the opposite. I would like to retain any spaces in the field! awk command seems to strip off all except for 1 space.

e.g. input == '20AA12 ZZ','20BB1 ZZ'
FS == ',' (comma)
Item == fix length of 10 char with embedded spaces.

printf ("'%s'\n",$1) and printf ("'%s'\n",$2) will result in '20AA12 ZZ' and '20BB1 ZZ'
i.e the item ended up with 9 and 8 chars respectively!

How to I preserve the extra spaces in the the items?
Thanks.

 

[jamisar]

use " instead of ' by imput string. ------------ jamisar
Einfachheit ist das Resultat der Reife. (Friedrich Schiller)
Simplicity is the fruit of maturity.

 

[Waspy]

the double quote doesn't seems work.
forgot to mention that the input is read from an external file.

e.g. fname == itemlst.dat

'20AA1...ZZ','20BB1...ZZ'
'30AA12..ZZ','30BB12..ZZ'
'40AA123.ZZ','40BB123.ZZ'
'50AA1234ZZ','50BB1234ZZ'

where the dot respresents the number of spaces.

e.g. of the script file (test.sh)

####################################
cat "./itemlist.dat" |while read ilist
do
item2=`echo ${ilist} | awk'
BEGIN{
FS=","
}
{
printf("'%s'\n",substr($2,2,8))
}' `

#some actions to work with the var item2
#e.g.
echo [${item2}]
done
####################################


instead of the expected output of :

[20BB1...]
[30BB12..]
[40BB123.]
[50BB1234]

the script output is :

[20BB1.ZZ]
[30BB12.Z]
[40BB123.]
[50BB1234]

each dot represent a space.
tested with both single/dbl quotes

 

[jamisar]

echo "aaa bbb,qq

http://www"|sed

-e "s/[^,]*/'&'/g"|tr ',' '\n'
gives you
'aaa bbb'
'qq www'
analog
sed -e "s/[^,]*/'&'/g" filename |tr ',' '\n'
------------ jamisar
Einfachheit ist das Resultat der Reife. (Friedrich Schiller)
Simplicity is the fruit of maturity.