AWK : the ' ' as field separator

Question

I have those lines from db dump

INSERT INTO db1 VALUES ('2', '33', '3', '1975', '3', '5', '1');
INSERT INTO db1 VALUES ('4', '23544', '1', '1987', '3', '1', '1');
INSERT INTO db1 VALUES ('2', '343', '3', '1975', '3', '5', '1');
INSERT INTO db1 VALUES ('4', '21', '1', '1987', '3', '1', '1');

As you seen the second filed is 33, 23544 ,343 using the ' '.

I want to substitute with awk with a numeric increasing filed (1,2,3..), I know how to do using $2++,but I don't know how to pass the ' as a field separator.

Using this syntax give me error:

awk 'BEGIN { FS = "' '" } ; { print $2 }'

Answer 1

What about

awk -F\' '{print $2}'

Just escape the '

Getting the output field separator back takes a bit more quoting, but can be done by setting OFS inside awk. Putting it all together with your question it would look like (with much appreciated cleanup from @Peter.O):

awk -F\' -vOFS=\' '{$2++;print}'