awk for loop increment value

Question

Reformating files to load into database. Details of files are given below the code.

What I have so far. Everything works except for calculating the hour.

awk 'BEGIN{ FS="|" ; OFS="\t" };
   { for (i = 4; i < NF; i=i+2 ) {          
# +2 Because need to walk row in pairs of QC/Value(s)
       if ( NF == 52 )  {   

            hour = (i - 2)/2  
# Need the value of i, not what is stored in position i.

            qualitycode = i     
            value = i + 1
            print ( $1,$2,$3,$hour,$qualitycode,$value )
        } else {
            print ( "ERROR",$NR,$0 )        
        }
    }
}' $origfile > $tempfile

cat $tempfile | grep ERROR > $errfile

cat $tempfile | grep -v ERROR > $newfile

How can I get the value of i instead of what is stored "in" position i?

In case you're interested.

Original data files are in this format:

Module|Sensor|Date|QC1|Value1|QC2|Value2|QC3|Value3|......|QC23|Value23|QC24|Value24|
90123|PQRST|20161015|4|12.45|4|11.23|4|10.40|4|9.89|......|4|21.36|4|20.55|
65432|BCDEF|20161015|4|6.45|4|7.51|2|9.01|4|11.74|.....|4|18.92|4|16.4|
.....many more rows

There is more than one module and each module has more than one sensor.

Would like to reformat to load into database:

Module\tSensor\tDate\tHour\tQC1\tValue1   
Module\tSensor\tDate\tHour\tQC2\tValue2   
Module\tSensor\tDate\tHour\tQC24\tValue24

Hour would of course need to increment from 1 to 24 for each module/sensor/day?

Answer 1

I think you've made a mistake in the print statement:

print $hour

This will de-reference the value in hour, grabbing the value of the field in the position stored in hour, whereas

print hour

will print the actual value in the variable hour.