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

Yes, this can be done nicely in awk. It's easy to get all the fields without any serious hacks.

(This example works in both The One True Awk and in gawk.)

{
  split($0, a, "\"")
  $2 = a[2]
  $3 = $(NF - 1)
  $4 = $NF
  print "and the fields are ", $1, "+", $2, "+", $3, "+", $4
}