How can I trim white space from a variable in awk?

Question

Suppose $2 is my variable. I have tried going from

awk -F\, '{print $2 ":"}' 

to

awk -F\, '{print gsub(/[ \t]+$/, "", $2) ":"}' 

But it goes from printing something to printing nothing at all.

Answer 1

You're printing the result of the gsub, but gsub does an in-place modify of $2 instead of returning a modified copy. Call gsub, then print:

awk -F\, '{gsub(/[ \t]+$/, "", $2); print $2 ":"}'