how to use "," as field delimiter [duplicate] - awk

Question

This question already has answers here:
Escaping separator within double quotes, in awk
(3 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
i have a file like this:
"1","ab,c","def"
so only use comma a field delimiter will get wrong result, so i want to use "," as field delimiter, i tried like this:
awk -F "," '{print $0}' file
or like this:
awk -F "","" '{print $0}' file
or like this:
awk -F '","' '{print $0}' file
but the result is incorrect, don't know how to include "" as part of the field delimiter itself,

Answer 1

If you can handle GNU awk, you could use FPAT:
$ echo '"1","ab,c","def"' | # echo outputs with double quotes
gawk ' # use GNU awk
BEGIN {
FPAT="([^,]*)|(\"[^\"]+\")" # because FPAT
}
{
for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) # loop all fields
gsub(/^"|"$/,"",$i) # remove leading and trailing double quotes
print $2 # output for example the second field
}'
Output:
ab,c
FPAT cannot handle RS inside the quotes.

Answer 2

What you are attempting seems misdirected anyway. How about this instead?
awk '/^".*"$/{ sub(/^\"/, ""); sub(/\"$/, ""); gsub(/\",\", ",") }1'
The proper solution to handling CSV files with quoting in them is to use a language which has an actual CSV parser. My thoughts go to Python, which includes a csv module in its standard library.

Answer 3

In GNU AWK
{print $0}
does print whole line, if no change were made original line is printed, no matter what field separator you set you will get original lines if only action is print $0. Use $1=$1 to trigger string rebuild.
If you must do it via FS AT ANY PRICE, then you might do it as follows: let file.txt content be
"1","ab,c","def"
then
BEGIN{FS="\x22,?\x22?"}{$1=$1;print $0}
output
1 ab,c def
Note leading space (ab,c is $3). Explanation: I inform GNU AWK that field separator is literal " (\x22, " is 22(hex) in ASCII) followed by zero or one (?) , followed by zero or one (?) literal " (\x22). $1=$1 trigger line rebuilt as mentioned earlier. Disclaimer: this solution assume that you never have escaped " inside your string,
(tested in gawk 4.2.1)