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How do I delete contents of a specific field, if it matches a pattern, and there is nothing else in the field? I have a several GB tsv file, and I am interested in a specific field (72). If it cont...
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2022-04-08T12:37:26Z (over 2 years ago)
How to delete contents of a specific field, if it matches a pattern and there is nothing else in the field
How do I delete contents of a specific field, if it matches a pattern, and there is nothing else in the field? I have a several GB tsv file, and I am interested in a specific field (72). If it contains hyphens, and *only* hyphens, then I want the hyphens deleted, leaving a blank field. I am using Ubuntu 20.04, with GNU awk v5. I've tried something like this:
`awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="\t"}{gsub(/-/,"",$72)}1' file.tsv`
But that also deletes the hyphens if there are other characters in the field too, which I do not want. E.g.
`blah------`
becomes
`blah`
but I want to leave it unchanged; but change
`---------------`
to nothing.