initialising field seperators on condition in awk - awk

Question

I know that initialising FS in BEGIN is the correct practice but what if i need different field seperators for different lines(lines containing a particular pattern)? eg: my awk script is
{if($0 ~ /.*youtube.*/){FS="=";print $2}}
This code is not processing the first line.How to fix this?

Answer 1

You can use split. Eks get the middle date from third field green
echo "on,cat ,blue|green|red,more" | awk -F, '{split($3,a,"|");print a[2]}'
green
And you BEGIN block is not only where you can set the Field Separator:
echo "on,two,three" | awk -F, '{print $2}'
echo "on,two,three" | awk '{print $2}' FS=,
echo "on,two,three" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=","} {print $2}'
echo "on,two,three" | awk -v FS=, '{print $2}'
All these will print two
But they may have some different impact in when they can be used.
awk -F, 'BEGIN{print FS}'
,
and this does not work and gives no output.
awk 'BEGIN{print FS}' FS=,
Back to your problem:
This:
awk '{if($0 ~ /.*youtube.*/){FS="=";print $2}}' file
should be:
awk '{if($0 ~ /.*youtube.*/){split($0,a,"=");print a[2]}}' file
You do not need to test for any characters before and after regex, so:
awk '{if($0 ~ /youtube/){split($0,a,"=");print a[2]}}' file
And this could even more be simplified:
awk '/youtube/ {split($0,a,"=");print a[2]}' file
If data is like this:
cat file
youtube=thisisyoutube1 //starts here
youtube=thisisyoutube2
youtube=thisisyoutube3
youtube=thisisyoutube4
yautube=thisisnottobeprinted
Then do like this:
awk -F= '/youtube/ {split($2,a," ");print a[1]}' file
thisisyoutube1
thisisyoutube2
thisisyoutube3
thisisyoutube4