gsub not accepting fourth argument in gawk

Fatipati

3/2/24, 11:43 AM

Have been using gsub when using gawk, but is not accepting the 4th argument. How can I fix this so that I get a string without blanks ?

  for ( knam in tseq ) {
    ## Remove any blanks from array element astr[i]
    str = "" ; gsub(/[[:blank:]]+/, "", astr[i], str)
    if ( knam == str ) {
      print "Matched line: " astr[i]
     }
   }

1 + 0

awk

Score:0

Ubuntu

steeldriver

3/2/24, 12:26 PM

At least as of GNU Awk 5.1.0, the gsub function takes only 3 arguments, modifies the third argument in place, and returns the number of substitutions made.

If you want to assign the result to a new string and leave the input unmodified, you can use gensub instead

str = gensub(/[[:blank:]]/,"", "g", astr[i])

However note that while gsub is portable, gensub is a GNU awk extension - if you don't need the advanced features of gensub (such as back-substitution) then use gsub but assign the string first:

str = astr[i]; gsub(/[[:blank:]]+/, "", str)

See The GNU Awk User's Guide: String-manipulation functions.

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