awk with regex for delimiter

Question

I want to get the first word in every line from a file. Unfortunately a lot of lines begin with space(s). So I try to get the firs word with the following:

awk -F'[ \t]+' '{print $1}' < MyFile.txt, but it's not working. I try this echo " some string: here" | awk -F'[ \t]+' '{print $1}' and the results is blank line (I thing that it prints empty string). So why this is not working? I want to make it works with the awk command and explicitly passed delimiter (with educational purposes)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

awk ignores leading blank spaces when assigning fields and the default command is print. So this should work fine:

awk '{print $1}'

Answer 2

In awk, the default field separator -F " " or BEGIN{FS=" "} follows a special convention

• (1) initial spaces and final spaces are ignored
• (2) splits by [ \t]+

Point (1) -- ignoring initial/final spaces -- just apply when field separator is exactly " ".

This behaviour is in fact what we would expect.

The default awk '{print $1}' works find and so does awk -F' ' '{print $1}'.

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There is another similar convention for the input record separator(RS): when RS="" it stands for paragraph separation:

• (1) separator is one or more empty lines
• (2) initial and final empty lines are ignored.

Point (2) -- ignoring initial/final empty lines -- just apply when input record separator is exactly "".

Answer 3

You are specifying a field separator for Awk that is made up of at least a space or a tab character.

You feed the string some string: here into Awk and ask it to print the first field.

You get no output because the first field is empty.

The fields in this string are

<1:>   <2:some> <3:string:> <4:here>

$ echo '   some string: here' | gawk 'BEGIN {OFS="|";FS="[ \t]+"}{print $1,$2,$3,$4}'
|some|string:|here

It is more visible with comma-separated input data, like

,some,string:,here

If you avoid specifying a delimiter, Awk will use any run spaces and/or tabs as the delimiter. Additionally, any such blank characters flanking the line on either side will not be considered when splitting the line into fields.

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If your input is JSON or YAML, consider using tools appropriate for parsing those structured document formats rather than using Awk. Suggestions for such tools include jq, yq, mlr, jtc and others.