[ale] AWK -- Strange chars used as separators in a CSV like file

Greg Freemyer greg.freemyer at gmail.com
Wed May 28 18:37:00 EDT 2008


All,

I have a CSV like file that uses   the octal single byte char 0376 as
a quote char and 024 as a comma (or cntrl-T).

I need to strip off the last column and discard it, so I thought I
could use awk to do it something like.

export FS='\024'
awk '{print $1,$2,$3}' my_file > my_output

It seems to still be use a space (' ') as the field seperator.  Any
idea what I'm doing wrong?

I've also tried
FS='\\024'
FS='\0376\024\0376'

FYI: This may be a one time need and it is only about 500 lines, so
using vi to manually do it is acceptable, but the text within the
quotes can be very long, so it is hard to work on visually.  The good
news is that cntrl-T (\024) should never appear within any of the
actual fields.

Thanks
Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer
Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist
http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer
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