Based on the documentation, I would not expect that there would be null elements in the array produced by patsplit, as long as the pattern requires at least one character, in my case 7.
# BUG: patsplit(string, array, pattern, seps) produces many unexpected 0 length elements in array
# DEMONSTRATION PROGRAM: Output a CSV with the input line and the array's elements for any line where there are array elements that are less than the length required by pattern. (These miss hits happen to all be 0 length)
# DEMONSTRATION INPUT DATA: the program itself. Input lines of interest are the comment lines at the bottom.
Alert: I am not a regexpert. It could be that my regex does match the null string, though I can't see how. It is a long assembly of several shorter regex's, each wrapped in () and then all ||'d together, as in: "(p1)||(p2)||(p3)||(p4)||(p5)"
"([ABDE][0-9][0-9A-Z]{4}[A-Z])||([ABDE][0-9A-Z]{1}[0-9][0-9A-Z]{3}[A-Z])||([ABDE][0-9A-Z]{2}[0-9][0-9A-Z]{2}[A-Z])||([ABDE][0-9A-Z]{3}[0-9][0-9A-Z]{1}[A-Z])||([ABDE][0-9A-Z]{4}[0-9][A-Z])"
The goal is to match 7 character strings that start with one of a few letters, ends in a letter, has alphanumerics in the middle, but must have at least one digit in the middle.
--
Thank you for all your efforts.
David--
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patsplitbug.awk