Tabbing the printed fields evenly using awk

Question

i need help using awk. Thanks

i have a file it contains the following

text.txt  
The Hunger Games:Suzanne Collins:1:2:3
Weapon X:Stan Lee:3:4:5
         


        

Answer 1

The output you show is not tab-separated, it's formatted as a table and for that all you need is:

$ column -t -s: file
The Hunger Games  Suzanne Collins  1  2  3
Weapon X          Stan Lee         3  4  5

If you really wanted it to be tab-separated then that'd be:

$ tr ':' '\t' < file
The Hunger Games        Suzanne Collins 1       2       3
Weapon X        Stan Lee        3       4       5

If you wanted specific fields:

$ cut -d':' -f 1,4 file | column -t -s:
The Hunger Games  2
Weapon X          4

$ cut -d':' -f 1,4 file | tr ':' '\t'
The Hunger Games        2
Weapon X        4

$ awk -F':' -v OFS='\t' '{print $1, $4}' file
The Hunger Games        2
Weapon X        4

If you don't have column but want tabular output, you can do it all in awk:

$ cat tst.awk
BEGIN { FS = ":"; ARGV[ARGC] = ARGV[ARGC-1]; ARGC++ }
{
    for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
        if (NR==FNR)
            width[i] = (length($i) > width[i] ? length($i) : width[i])
        else
            printf "%-*s%s", width[i], $i, (i