Awk Iterate through several Arrays in a for loop - awk

Question

I have created an awk program to go through the columns of a file and count each distinct word and then output totals into separate files
awk -F"$delim" {Field_Arr1[$1]++; Field_Arr2[$2]++; Field_Arr3[$3]++; Field_Arr4[$4]++};
END{\
# output fields
out_field1="top_field1"
out_field2="top_field2"
out_field3="top_field3"
out_field4="top_field4"
for( i=1; i <= NF; i++)
{
for (element in Field_Arr$i)
{
print element"\t"Field_Arr$i[element] >>out_field$i;
}
}
}' inputfile
but I don't know the appropriate syntax, so that the for loop will iterate through Field_Arr1, Field_Arr2, Field_Arr3, Field_Arr4?
I have tried using: i, $i, ${i}, {i}, "$i", and "i".
Am I trying the wrong approach or is there a way to change Field_Arr$i to Field_Arr1..4?
Thanks for the advice.

Answer 1

awk variables don't work that way; you'll have to do them individually by name, or use fake multidimensional arrays and parse out the components, something along the lines of:
{Field_Arr[1, $1]++; Field_Arr[2, $2]++; Field_Arr[3, $3]++; Field_Arr[4, $4]++}
END {
for (elt in Field_Arr) {
split(elt, ec, SUBSEP)
print ec[2] "\t" Field_Arr[elt] >> ("top_field" ec[1])
}
}

Answer 2

To count the frequencies for each column (3 in my example), try this
# Print list of word frequencies
function p_array(t,a) {
print t
for (i in a) {
print i, a[i]
}
}
{
c1[$1]++
c2[$1]++
c3[$1]++
}
END {
p_array("1st col",c1)
p_array("2nd col",c2)
p_array("3rd col",c3)
}