2009/9/17 yy <yiyu....@gmail.com>:
> if you want to preserve white-space, you better forget about fields
> and work with indexes on the string, match is your friend:
>
> % echo '1 3 4 8' | awk '{match($0, /[ \t]*[^ \t]+[
> \t]+/);a=RLENGTH+1;match(substr($0, a), /[ \t]/);print
> substr($0,0,a-1) "hell" substr($0,RSTART+a)}'
> 1 hell 4 8
Well, it's just so difficult for me to read this. :)
Also, i don't see how to easily modify it to flexibly work for any
(not known beforehand) column, as I need.
Why do you think this is better than my final solution?
> this is indeed a bit OT here, maybe next time you prefer trying in
> #awk at freenode, where this kind of problems are welcomed
I didn't know there is a separate channel for awk...
Thanks
Ruda
