title: Using AWK with CSV files with commas inbetween quotation marks tags: awk,csv
Sometimes you'll get a CSV like: Here is something, And another thing, "OH LOOK, A COMMA WITHIN QUOTATION MARKS", something else.
This is annoying, since a normal awk separator like -F , will not work. But in modern version of awk, you can use -FPAT to use a regular expression.
Use awk -vFPAT='[^,]*|"[^"]*"'. This says you're either looking for a field that ends in a comma, or looking for anything that begins and ends with quotation marks.