How to make awk ignore the field delimiter inside double quotes? [duplicate]

Question

I need to delete 2 columns in a comma seperated values file. Consider the following line in the csv file:

"[email protected],www.example.com",field2,field3,field4 "[email protected]",field2,field3,field4 

Now, the result I want at the end:

"[email protected],www.example.com",field4 "[email protected]",field4 

I used the following command:

awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=","}{print $1,$4}' 

But the embedded comma which is inside quotes is creating a problem, Following is the result I am getting:

"[email protected],field3 "[email protected]",field4 

Now my question is how do I make awk ignore the "," which are inside the double quotes?

Answer 1

From the GNU awk manual (http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html#Splitting-By-Content):

$ awk -vFPAT='([^,]*)|("[^"]+")' -vOFS=, '{print $1,$4}' file "[email protected],www.example.com",field4 "[email protected]",field4 

and see What's the most robust way to efficiently parse CSV using awk? for more generally parsing CSVs that include newlines, etc. within fields.