An Awk Primer/Numbers and Strings

Numbers

Numbers can be expressed in Awk as either decimal integers or floating-point quantities. For example:

• 789
• 3.141592654
• +67
• +4.6E3
• -34
• -2.1e-2

There is no provision for specifying values in other bases, such as hex or octal; however, as will be shown later, it is possible to output them from Awk in hex or octal format.

Strings

Strings are expressed in double quotes. For example:

• "All work and no play makes Jack a homicidal maniac!"
• "1987A1"
• "do re mi fa so la ti do"

Awk also supports null strings, which are represented by empty quotes: "".

There are various "special" characters that can be embedded into strings:

• \n Newline (line feed)
• \t Horizontal tab (aligns to next column of 8 spaces)
• \b Backspace
• \r Carriage return
• \f Form feed (possibly causes a new page, if printing)

A double-quote (") can be embedded in a string by preceding it with a backslash, and a backslash can be embedded in a string by typing it in twice: \\. If a backslash is used with other characters (say, \m), it is simply treated as a normal character.