How do you escape a backslash in awk?
1 Answer. In awk strings, backslash is used to introduce C-like escape sequences like \b for backspace, \n for newline, \123 for octal sequences… You need \\ for backslash itself. \N itself is not currently a known escape sequence in any awk implementation that I know.
What type of regex does awk use?
A regular expression enclosed in slashes (‘ / ‘) is an awk pattern that matches every input record whose text belongs to that set. The simplest regular expression is a sequence of letters, numbers, or both. Such a regexp matches any string that contains that sequence.
How do you escape special characters in awk?
One use of an escape sequence is to include a double-quote character in a string constant. Since a plain double-quote would end the string, you must use `\”‘ to represent an actual double-quote character as a part of the string. For example: $ awk ‘BEGIN { print “He said \”hi!\
Is awk regex?
Because regular expressions are such a fundamental part of awk programming, their format and use deserve a separate chapter. A regular expression enclosed in slashes (‘ / ‘) is an awk pattern that matches every input record whose text belongs to that set. Such a regexp matches any string that contains that sequence.
What does an escape sequence represent in AWK?
Other escape sequences represent unprintable characters such as TAB or newline. There is nothing to stop you from entering most unprintable characters directly in a string constant or regexp constant, but they may look ugly. The following list presents all the escape sequences used in awk and what they represent.
Do you have to write backslash in escape sequence?
The backslash character itself is another character that cannot be included normally; you must write ‘ \\\\ ’ to put one backslash in the string or regexp. Thus, the string whose contents are the two characters ‘ ” ’ and ‘ \\ ’ must be written “\\”\\\\” . Other escape sequences represent unprintable characters such as TAB or newline.
Why do you need to escape quotes in gawk?
Because the string is delimited by double quotes, you need to escape any quote that is part of the string, in order to tell awk to keep processing the rest of the string. In gawk, a number of additional two-character sequences that begin with a backslash have special meaning in regexps.
When to use a backslash in a regexp?
In a regexp, a backslash before any character that is not in the previous list and not listed in gawk -Specific Regexp Operators means that the next character should be taken literally, even if it would normally be a regexp operator. For example, /a\\+b/ matches the three characters ‘ a+b ’.