awk remove endings of words ending with patterns - awk

Question

I have a large dataset and am trying to lemmatize a column ($14) with awk, which is I need to remove 'ing', 'ed', 's' in words if it ends with one of those pattern. So asked, asks, asking would be just 'ask' after all.
Let's say I have this dataset (the column I want to make modifications is $2:
onething This is a string that is tested multiple times.
twoed I wanted to remove words ending with many patterns.
threes Reading books is good thing.
With that, expected output is:
onething Thi i a str that i test multiple time.
twoed I want to remove word end with many pattern.
threes Read book i good th.
I have tried following regex with awk, but it didnt work.
awk -F'\t' '{gsub(/\(ing|ed|s\)\b/," ",$2); print}' file.txt
#this replaces some of the words with ing and ed, not all, words ending with s stays the same (which I dont want)
Please help, I'm new to awk and still exploring it.

Answer 1

Using GNU awk for gensub() and \> for word boundaries:
$ awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="\t"} {$2=gensub(/(ing|ed|s)\>/,"","g",$2)} 1' file
onething Thi i a str that i test multiple time.
twoed I want to remove word end with many pattern.
threes Read book i good th.

Answer 2

Using any awk with gsub you could do:
awk -F'\t' -v OFS="\t" '
{ gsub(/(s|ed|ing)[.[:blank:]]/," ",$2)
match($2,/[.]$/) || sub(/[[:blank:]]$/,".",$2)
}1
' file
Example Input File
$ cat file
onething This is a string that is tested multiple times.
twoed I wanted to remove words ending with many patterns.
threes Reading books is good thing.
four Just a normal sentence.
Example Use/Output
$ awk -F'\t' -v OFS="\t" '
> { gsub(/(s|ed|ing)[.[:blank:]]/," ",$2)
> match($2,/[.]$/) || sub(/[[:blank:]]$/,".",$2)
> }1
> ' file
onething Thi i a str that i test multiple time.
twoed I want to remove word end with many pattern.
threes Read book i good th.
four Just a normal sentence.
(note: last line added as example of a sentence unchanged)

Answer 3

If you use GNU awk you were not far from it:
$ awk -F'\t' -v OFS='\t' '{gsub(/ing|ed|s\>/,"",$2); print}' file.txt
onething Thi i a str that i test multiple time.
twoed I want to remove word end with many pattern.
threes Read book i good th.
Note -v OFS='\t' to use tabs also as output field separators.
But if your awk uses the kind of obsolete regular expressions without word boundaries (like the default awk that comes with macOS) things are more complicated. One option is to iteratively use match and substr. Example:
# foo.awk
BEGIN {
n = split(prefix, word, /,/)
for(i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
len[i] = length(word[i])
}
}
{
for(i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
re = word[i] "[^[:alnum:]]"
while(m = match($2, re)) {
if(m == 1) {
$2 = substr($2, len[i]+1, length($2))
} else {
$2 = substr($2, 1, m-1) substr($2, m+len[i], length($2))
}
}
}
print
}
And then:
$ awk -F'\t' -v OFS='\t' -v prefix="ing,ed,s" -f foo.awk file.txt
onething Thi i a str that i test multiple time.
twoed I want to remove word end with many pattern.
threes Read book i good th.