In awk, how to print a range of fields with the original $0 delimiters intact?

Question

How to extract a substring of $0, in awk, when that substring's position and length is based on the positions of fields in the original $0?

It effectively equates to removing the first n.lead fields and the last n.trail fields and all those fields' leading and trailing delimiters, from the original $0

Here is an example: It is only known that the range is $4 to $8 inclusive.
The delimiter is any number of spaces and/or a single comma, eg. " , " or just ","... and the leading delimiter is to be ignored.

          Input: "   a  a  a   X marks   the   start,   Y   marks the  end  "
Expected Output: "X marks   the   start,     Y"

Answer 1

Awk doesn't remember the field positions or the delimiter strings. You'll have to find out the field positions manually. It's not very hard.

echo "   a  b  c   X marks   the   start,   Y   marks the  end  " |
awk '{
    i=1; n=1; tmp=$0;  # i=field number, n=column number
    while (match(tmp, / *, *| +/)) {
        A[i]=n; B[i]=n+RSTART-1;     # A[i],B[i] = start,end of delimiter i
        ++i; n+=RSTART+RLENGTH-1;
        tmp=substr(tmp,RSTART+RLENGTH)
    }
    print substr($0, A[5], B[9]-A[5])   # start at 4+1 because the first field is empty
}'

Answer 2

This can be a solution, as long as there are no tabs as delimiters

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

  {
    start = index($0, " " $4 " ")
    stop  = index($0, " " $8 " ")
    print substr($0, start+1, stop - start + length($8))
  }

Answer 3

As it stands, it works for data with and without a leading delimiter, but will fail if any field contains "regex sensitive" data. A workaround is to substitute regex dots .{length of field} for each field... Here is a link to such a version... It is cludgey, but it won't crash because of the above mentioned issue:

awk 'BEGIN { FS = "([ \t]+)|([ \t]*,[ \t]*)" }
{ # Ignore leading delimiter, if present 
  hasLeadDlm = match($0, "^("FS")")
  LeadDlm = substr($0, 1, RLENGTH)
  if (hasLeadDlm) { sub("^("FS")", ""); }    # delete leading whitespace 
  sub("^"$1"("FS")"$2"("FS")"$3"("FS")", "") # delete leading fields
  match( $0, "^"$1"("FS")"$2"("FS")"$3"("FS")"$4"("FS")"$5)
  print substr($0, 1, RLENGTH)
}' <<< \
"a    X  a   X marks   the   start, ssY   marks the  end  
 a    X  a   X   marks the   start,  sY   marks the  end  
  a   X  a   X marks     the start,   Y   marks the  end  
   a  X  a   X marks   the     start ,Y   marks the  end  
    a   X  a   X marks   the   start,sssY   marks the  end"