bash - Awk consider double quoted string as one token and ignore space in between

Question

Data file - data.txt:

ABC "I am ABC" 35 DESC
DEF "I am not ABC" 42 DESC

cat data.txt | awk '{print $2}'

will result the "I" instead of the string being quoted

How to make awk so that it ignore the space within the quote and think that it is one single token?

Answer 1

Another alternative would be to use the FPAT variable, that defines a regular expression describing the contents of each field.

Save this AWK script as parse.awk:

#!/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {
  FPAT = "([^ ]+)|("[^"]+")"
}
{
  print $2
}

Make it executable with chmod +x ./parse.awk and parse your data file as ./parse.awk data.txt:

"I am ABC"
"I am not ABC"