awk command to print columns with colum data - awk

Question

cat file1.txt | awk -F '{print $1 "|~|" $2 "|~|" $3}' > file2.txt
I am using above command to filter first three columns from file1 and put into file.
But only getting the column names and not the column data.
How to do that?
|~| - is the delimiter.
file1.txt has values as :
a|~|b|~|c|~|d|~|e
1|~|2|~|3|~|4|~|5
11|~|22|~|33|~|44|~|55
111|~|222|~|333|~|444|~|555
my expedted output is :
a|~|b|~|c
1|~|2|~|3
11|~|22|~|33
111|~|222|~|333

Answer 1

With your shown samples, please try following awk code. You need to set field separator to |~| and remove starting space from lines, then print the lines.
awk -F'\\|~\\|' -v OFS='|~|' '{sub(/^[[:blank:]]+/,"");print $1,$2,$3}' Input_file
In case you want to keep spaces(which was in initial post before edit) then try following:
awk -F'\\|~\\|' -v OFS='|~|' '{print $1,$2,$3}' Input_file
NOTE: Had a chat with user in room and got to know why this code was not working for user because of gunzip -c file was being used wrongly, its output was being saved into a variable on which user was running awk program, so correcting that command generated right file and awk program ran fine on it. Adding this as a reference for future readers.

Answer 2

One approach would be:
awk -v FS="," -v OFS="|~|" '{gsub(/[|][~][|]/,","); sub(/^\s*/,""); print $1,$2,$3}' file1.txt
The approach simply replaces all "|~|" with a "," setting the output file separator to "|~|". All leading whitespace is trimmed with sub().
Example Use/Output
With your data in file1.txt, you would have:
$ awk -v FS="," -v OFS="|~|" '{gsub(/[|][~][|]/,","); sub(/^\s*/,""); print $1,$2,$3}' file1.txt
a|~|b|~|c
1|~|2|~|3
11|~|22|~|33
111|~|222|~|333
Let me know if this is what you intended. You can simply redirect, e.g. > file2.txt to write to the second file.

Answer 3

For such cases, my bash+awk script rcut comes in handy:
rcut -Fd'|~|' -f-3 ip.txt
The -F option enables fixed string input delimiter (which is given using the -d option). And by default, the output field separator will also be same as -d when -F is active. -f-3 is similar to cut syntax to specify first three fields.
For better speed, use hck command:
hck -Ld'|~|' -D'|~|' -f-3 ip.txt
Here, -L enables literal field separator and -D specifies output field separator.
Another benefit is that hck supports -z option to automatically handle common compressed formats based on filename extension (adding this since OP had an issue with compressed input).

Answer 4

Another way:
sed 's/|~|/\t/g' file1.txt | awk '{print $1"|~|"$2"|~|"$3}' > file2.txt
First replace the |~| delimiter, and use the default awk separator, then print columns what you need.