AWK Essential Training
Overview
Learn how to manipulate and format data with AWK, a Mac and Linux command-line tool.
So you've got a large data set. New information is always coming in, and it's messy and inconsistent. Text files, Excel spreadsheets, web forms, email messages, and so on. You'd like to find a way to format it into something clean and consistent you can use in a database, and you'd like to automate that process as much as possible. Enter AWK, a command-line tool for Mac, Unix, and Linux that allows you to manipulate data in powerful ways.
In this course, award-winning author and teacher David D. Levine shows you how to use AWK to read and write data in a variety of formats, produce reports, and automate repetitive tasks. He reviews the nuts and bolts of the language, such as field separators, pattern matching, variables, operators, expressions, and control structures; functions available for manipulating data; and integration with other programs like Excel.
So you've got a large data set. New information is always coming in, and it's messy and inconsistent. Text files, Excel spreadsheets, web forms, email messages, and so on. You'd like to find a way to format it into something clean and consistent you can use in a database, and you'd like to automate that process as much as possible. Enter AWK, a command-line tool for Mac, Unix, and Linux that allows you to manipulate data in powerful ways.
In this course, award-winning author and teacher David D. Levine shows you how to use AWK to read and write data in a variety of formats, produce reports, and automate repetitive tasks. He reviews the nuts and bolts of the language, such as field separators, pattern matching, variables, operators, expressions, and control structures; functions available for manipulating data; and integration with other programs like Excel.
Syllabus
Introduction
- Welcome
- What you should know before watching this course
- Using the exercise files
- What is AWK?
- Writing an AWK program
- Working with records, fields, patterns, and actions
- Using AWK command-line flags
- Exploring basic input-field separators
- Specifying field and record separators with variables
- Challenge: Change a CSV file to a tab-separated one
- Solution: Change a CSV file to a tab-separated one
- Using built-in variables
- Creating user-defined variables
- Working with operators and arrays
- Regular expression basics
- Working with character classes and quantifiers
- Building control structures
- Creating an HTML table
- Challenge: Print only those lines consisting of a complete HTML entity
- Solution: Print only those lines consisting of a complete HTML entity
- Formatting output with printf()
- Formatting output with width and precision specifiers
- Manipulating strings
- Using associative arrays
- Introducing AWK's math functions
- Using pipes
- Parsing Excel CSV files: Line endings and quoting
- Parsing Excel CSV files: Commas and new lines
- Scripting with AWK
- Challenge: Perform a join
- Solution: Perform a join
- Goodbye
Taught by
David D. Levine
Never Stop Learning!
