Re: [bug-gawk] Read one character at a time

[Manuel Collado]

El 22/01/2019 a las 22:57, Andrew J. Schorr escribió:
> ...
> There may be a better solution, but here's one that puts each character
> into the RT variable:
>
> bash-4.2$ echo 'abc
> > def' | gawk -v 'RS=.{1}' '{printf "[%s]\n", RT}'
> [a]
> [b]
> [c]
> [
> ]
> [d]
> [e]
> [f]
> [
> ]

I feel RS="(.)" a simpler idiom than RS=".{1}". But, of course, this is 
a matter of taste. And RS=".?" also works in this case.

But why RS="" doesn't deliver each input character as a record? It gives 
the whole file as a single record. This seems to be inconsistent w.r.t. 
FS="". The latter lets each character to become a field.

I've not found an explicit mention to RS="" in the docs. Maybe I'm 
missing something, but the section about record splitting doesn't 
contains a summery subsection similar to the summary for FS values.

Regards.

--
Manuel Collado - http://lml.ls.fi.upm.es/~mcollado