Regex in IF condition in awk

Question

I have awk script file as below. I need to add another condition in the if statement to check if the string contains atleast one alphabet. How can I add the extra condition to the present if statement?

Required regex condition: [[ "$1" =~ [A-Za-z] ]]

BEGIN { FS = ";"; counter=0}

{ 
 if ((length($1) != 10 && length($1) != 12))
   { 
    counter++
    print counter, $1;
    if ($counter -gt 2){
        print "Invalid input file";
        exit;
    }    
   }
}

I am getting error if I use the same condition which I have posted. How to add the condition?

Answer 1

You don't actually show how you add the regex, so I am guessing you are using the same format: =~ [A-Za-z]. That won't work. Each language has its own syntax for regex matching. In awk, the format is $target ~ /$regex/, so $1 ~ /[A-Za-z]/.

BEGIN { FS = ";"; counter=0}

{ 
 if (length($1) != 10 && length($1) != 12 && $1 ~ /[A-Za-z]/)
   { 
    counter++
    print counter, $1;
    if (counter > 2){
        print "Invalid input file";
        exit;
    }    
   }
}

Also, in awk, the $ sign is used to mark fields, not variables. So $counter will be evaluated to the field number of counter. If counter is 2, then $counter will be the value of the second field. And the -gt is also not an awk thing. Just use >.