Re: [bug-gawk] FIELDWIDTHS extension request

[Ed Morton]

People are really using it this way. I personally have to do it a couple of 
times a year with different situations (parsing log files, schedules, etc. in 
various formats) and then there's, for example, the following questions and 
comments from people online using or best served by the same solution:

http://www.unix.com/unix-for-dummies-questions-and-answers/259428-find-replace-single-character-w-awk-given-conditions.html
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/208888/sed-replace-at-a-specific-group-of-positions
https://www.cpume.com/question/tfnznotf-formatting-output-in-bash-or-awk.html
http://blog.bogojoker.com/tag/gawk/
http://bida001.com/question/119893
http://stackoverflow.com/q/35178883/1745001
http://stackoverflow.com/q/26842477/1745001
http://stackoverflow.com/q/43942619/1745001
http://stackoverflow.com/q/24909124/1745001
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.awk/uip6-Ll9Lj0/_wMoc7lEAwAJ

Regards,

    Ed.

On 5/19/2017 4:13 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> Is this request based on a theoretical discussion, or is someone
> actually using FIELDWIDTHS do real work?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arnold
>
> Ed Morton <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Could we get an extension for FIELDWIDTHS such that a "*" (or some other
> > indicator) means "everything else"? It's very common to have to deal with files
> > like:
> >
> >       foo  bar    stuff
> >       bill johnny other stuff of some different length
> >
> > where it's easy to see the length of the first 2 fields but the length of the
> > final field can't be determined based on any sample so we end up writing code 
> > like:
> >
> >       FIELDWIDTHS = "5 7 9999"
> >
> > and pick some arbitrary number that we hope will be big enough to hold whatever
> > appears in that 3rd field. It would be clearer and more robust if we could
> > instead write:
> >
> >       FIELDWIDTHS = "5 7 *"
> >
> > or similar.
> >
> > We've been having a discussion about the applicability of this at
> > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.awk/uip6-Ll9Lj0 in case some
> > more background is useful.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> >       Ed.