Awk : does not report error for 202D, 203B etc, it accepts one alpha character

Question

I need to find out whether a field in a pipe delimited file is a numeric or not. I need to report if the field is not a numeric field, ignore if it is numeric and also ignore if it is null. I have other computations.

I wrote this code:

gawk -v w_column_pos="$column_pos" -F "|" '
$w_column_pos !~ /^([+-]|[0-9])[0-9]*(.[0-9]*)$|^([+-]|[0-9])[0-9]*$|^$/ { print $w_column_pos," is not Numeric"; } ' $src_data_file

w_column_pos="$column_pos" is used for getting the column number

The problem is, it does not report error for 202D, 203B etc; it accepts one alpha character.

But it does report error for 202DD.

I previously had /^([+-]|[0-9])[0-9]*(.[0-9]*)?$|^$/; this also had the same issue.

Sample input file
Name|Designation|Is Employee| Organisation ID|Hire Date
Alex Conolly|Prof1|TrUE|100|12072015
Thomas |Prof2|TRUE|200B|09072016
Christine prof1|FALSE||24902007
John Martini|PPP|TRUE~FALSE|202|11782099
xxYY |PPP|TRUE|91.67|11782099
ABD S | XXX | FALSEx | 209|11093000

I am asking about 4th column: Organisation id which is a number type

My code works fine, but 200B(in the 3rd row) is not reported

it would be a good idea to give a sample input text and expected output as well — Sundeep, Sep 22 '16 at 10:04
You can probably simplify your example to something along the lines of `awk 'BEGIN { print "202D" ~ /pattern/ }'` - that would make it easier for us to reproduce your issue. — Tom Fenech, Sep 22 '16 at 10:20

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 23 '16 at 22:35

0

Change the pattern to:

/^([+-]|[0-9])[0-9]*([.][0-9]*)$|^([+-]|[0-9])[0-9]*$|^$/

The unprotected "." was matching the "B".

answered Sep 23 '16 at 22:35

joast

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Awk : does not report error for 202D, 203B etc, it accepts one alpha character

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