UNIX AWK escaping single quotes

Question

Possible Duplicate:
UNIX shell script and escaping quotes for AWK script

I have a UNIX script that has nawk block inside it (This is just a part of the UNIX and NAWK script. It has many more logic and the below code should definitely be in nawk) This block that reads a lookup value for Country ISO code from a file that has country and country code values and I face an issue whenever there is a bracket in the country name () or a single apostrope '

These are just sample values and it can have many countries with single quote and parantheses

Sample values

CIV@COTE D'IVOIRE
COD@CONGO, Democratic Republic of (was Zaire)
HRV@CROATIA (local name: Hrvatska)

Can you pls help me overcome these 2 issues of if a string has a single quote or parantheses.

Is there anyway I can escape this single quote and apostrope dynamically ?

Code

processbody() {

nawk '{

           // These are sample values not exhaustive
           COUNTRY_NAME = "COTE D'IVOIRE" // this is read dynamically inside nawk
           #COUNTRY_NAME = "CONGO, Democratic Republic of (was Zaire)"  // this is read dynamically inside nawk
           #COUNTRY_NAME = "CROATIA (local name: Hrvatska)"  // this is read dynamically inside nawk
            if (COUNTRY_NAME != " "){

                           file = "/tmp/country_codes.txt"
                          FS = "@"
                          while( getline < file ) {
                          if( $0 ~ COUNTRY_NAME ) {
                          COUNTRY_CODE = $1
                           }
                           }
                           close( file )



            }

 printf("%s\n",COUNTRY_CODE) > "/tmp/code.txt"

  }' /tmp/file.txt
  }

  processbody

My question in both the links are how to escape sequence the single quote and paranthesis for dynamic value inside awk and I am still looking for an answer pls help — user549432, Jul 18 '11 at 20:24
Please show us some sample input from country_codes.txt and file.txt and what output would you like to see. There has to be a better way to structure your code so you don't have to read the country codes file for every single line of the input file. — glenn jackman, Jul 19 '11 at 01:06

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 19 '11 at 12:06

You have a couple of problems. Hardcoding a single quote inside a single quoted string (the nawk body), and the fact that you're using the ~ operator which does regular expression matching, not string comparison.

What do you mean by "this is read dynamically inside nawk"? In your example you're hardcoding the value. Are you reading it from a file?

There are a couple of ways to get a single quote inside a single quoted string:

escape the single quote with a backslash: nawk '... x="what\'s up" ...'
shell string contatenation: nawk '...x="what'"'"'s up" ...'
use a heredoc:

.

nawk_script=<<'END'
{ 
  x="what's up" 
  ...
}
END
nawk "$nawk_script" /tmp/file.txt

Regarding the parentheses problem, simply use a string comparison function instead of a regex matching operator:

if (index($0, COUNTRY_NAME) > 0) {
  ...
}

UNIX AWK escaping single quotes

1 Answers1