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Background:
I have a column that should get user input in form of "Description text ref12345678". I have existing scripts that grab the reference number but unfortunately some users add it incorrectly so instead of "ref12345678" it can be "ref 12345678", "RF12345678", "abcd12345678" or any variation. Naturally the wrong formatting breaks some of the triggered scripts. For now I can't control the user input to this field, so I want to make the scripts later in the pipeline just to get the number.
At the moment I'm stripping the letters with awk '{gsub(/[[:alpha:]]/, "")}; 1', but substitution seems like an inefficient solution. (I know I can do this also with sed -n 's/.*[a-zA-Z]//p' and tr -d '[[:alpha:]]' but they are essentially the same and I want awk for additional programmability).
The question is, is there a way to set awk to either print only numbers from a string, or set delimits to numeric items in a string? (or is substitution really the most efficient solution for this problem).
So in summary: how do I use awk for $ echo "ref12345678" to print only "12345678" without substitution?
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Extract Number From String – Bash Examples The first method we will look at to extract a number is to use the tr command. Another method is to use the sed command. Note that the examples above will also work when extracting multiple numbers from a string, but they will combine the numbers.
The AWK language is useful for manipulation of data files, text retrieval and processing. -F <value> - tells awk what field separator to use. In your case, -F: means that the separator is : (colon). '{print $4}' means print the fourth field (the fields being separated by : ).
If you notice awk 'print $1' prints first word of each line. If you use $3, it will print 3rd word of each line.
The awk implementation of cut uses the getopt() library function (see Processing Command-Line Options) and the join() library function (see Merging an Array into a String). The current POSIX version of cut has options to cut fields based on both bytes and characters.
if awk is not a must:
grep -o '[0-9]\+' example:
kent$ echo "ref12345678"|grep -o '[0-9]\+' 12345678 with awk for your example:
kent$ echo "ref12345678"|awk -F'[^0-9]*' '$0=$2' 12345678 If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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