Awk consider double quoted string as one token and ignore space in between

Question

Data file - data.txt:

ABC \"I am ABC\" 35 DESC
DEF \"I am not ABC\" 42 DESC

cat data.txt | awk \'{print $2}\'

will re

Answer 1

Here is something like what I finally got working that is more generic for my project. Note it doesn't use awk.

someText="ABC \"I am ABC\" 35 DESC '1 23' testing 456"
putItemsInLines() {
    local items=""
    local firstItem="true"
    while test $# -gt 0; do
        if [ "$firstItem" == "true" ]; then
            items="$1"
            firstItem="false"
        else
            items="$items
$1"
        fi
        shift
    done
    echo "$items"
}

count=0
while read -r valueLine; do
    echo "$count: $valueLine"
    count=$(( $count + 1 ))
done <<< "$(eval putItemsInLines $someText)"

Which outputs:

0: ABC
1: I am ABC
2: 35
3: DESC
4: 1 23
5: testing
6: 456