Re: sub("@\^","^",$0) doesn't

[Aharon Robbins]

Greetings. Re this:

> From: "Clinton Wittstruck" <address@hidden>
> To: <address@hidden>
> Subject: sub("@\^","^",$0) doesn't
> Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 17:25:51 -0800
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
>
> I've noticed a weird discrepency between awk on HP-UX 11.0 and Red Hat
> Linux 2.2.16-22 (GNU Awk 3.0.6 -- I also downloaded and tested gawk
> 3.1.1)
>
> For an occurance of "@^", substitue "^" -- (strip out the "@" before
> "^")
>
> I tried: sub("@\^","^",$0)
>
> On HP-UX awk this works but with gawk on Linux it does not.

You need an extra backslash in the string. For string constants,
you always need two backslashes to get sub/gsub to see one. This
is described in the gawk manual.  Here is what I get:

        $ echo here is an @^ | gawk '{ sub("@\\^", "^", $0); print }'
        here is an ^

Thanks,

Arnold