Re: FPAT/printing fields bug

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 11:52:22AM -0500, Ed Morton wrote:
> Looks like there's an FPAT bug in gawk 5.0.1:
> 
> $ echo ',b' | gawk -v FPAT='[^,]*' '{print $2}'
> b
> 
> $ echo ',b' | gawk -v FPAT='[^,]*' '{print $1, $2}'
> 
> $
> 
> It can be worked around in the same way as a previous bug
> (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gawk/2017-04/msg00000.html):
> 
> $ echo ',b' | gawk -v FPAT='[^,]*' '{oFPAT=FPAT; FPAT="";
> FPAT=oFPAT; print $1, $2}'
>  b
> $

Interesting. FYI, a simpler workaround is to access NF. For example:

echo ',b' | ./gawk -v FPAT='[^,]*' '{x = NF; printf "[%s] [%s]\n", $1, $2}'

I don't currently have time to dig deeper...

Regards,
Andy