find the number of the field

Question

i have this line in the file:

,2,353867835022;11,353681041426390,272023201187741,272-02f-20017-06609,353854100352;11,,,,,,,0854100352,3,00,,O,D,DATA,,,7124395,,,17687,16,HPLMN,M20MSS_TTFILE_8377_20110528170245,M20MSS,W30B22I;0GRI3,1,20110528130013,170054,1,41,,,,,,,,0,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,353868001820,,,,b60a5c0014,1:353867835022::::0854100352::353854100352,,,,,,,,

Yes, this is a comma"," separated file.there is a number 17687 .I want to know what is the number of that field in the line. i want to use that as a base and include that in a shell script.

Answer 1

Field #26:

% awk -F',' '/17687/ {
    for (f = 0; f < NF; ++f) {
        if ($f == "17687") {
            print $f " found in field number " f " of " NF " on line " NR "."
        }
    }
}' test.csv
17687 found in field number 26 of 75 on line 1.

This allows for finding 17687 in multiple fields on multiple lines.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

So, you want the number of commas before the 17687? One way to do it is:

sed -r 's/(^.*,)17687,.*$/\1/;s/[^,]//g'|wc -c

This grabs everything before the 17687, removes all the non-commas, and counts the number of characters.

Using this in a script, you might do something like:

FIELD_NO=`sed -r 's/(^.*,)17687,.*$/\1/;s/[^,]//g'|wc -c`
cut -d',' -f$FIELD_NO some_file