Re: awk challenge

Stepan Kasal wrote:
> Kenny McCormack wrote: 
GAWK?
>
> In a following post, Kenny posted an implementation, featuring:
> 
>
> well, this has the usual limitations:
> 1) you cannot use static RE (delimited by slashes) as parameter
> 	(we are discussing non-Thompson awk, of course)
> 2) when you run match on substring, you change semantics of ^,
>       \<, \>, etc.
>
> Problem 1) is worked around by using ``dynamic RE's'' a.k.a.
> backslash hell.
> The 2) cennot be worked around, it simply makes the ``general''
> functions less general.

I think I've found a workaround for 2).

[Remove "." at beginning of each line.]

.function extract(s,re) {
.        match(s,re)
.        return substr(s,RSTART,RLENGTH)
.        }
.
.# Only works if string doesn't contain ASCII 1.
.function splitp(s,A,re,        mark,_mark )
.{ delete A
.  mark = sprintf( "%c", 1 )
.  _mark = "[^" mark "]"
.  gsub( re, mark "&" mark, s  )
.  gsub( "^" _mark "*" mark "|" mark _mark "*$", "", s )
.  return split( s, A, mark _mark "*" mark )
.}
.
.BEGIN{
.  $0 = "QuiribusX is FooBar fooBar Boom!"
.  print "Result:",n = splitp( $0, A, "\\<[A-Z][a-z]*" )
.  for (i=1; i<=n; i++) print i,"|"A[i]"|"
.
.  $0 = "foo  @   bar @ biz@boo  @ foo   bye"
.  print "Result:",n = splitp( $0, A, "^foo| +@ +" )
.  for (i=1; i<=n; i++) print i,"|"A[i]"|"
.}


Result: 3
1 |Quiribus|
2 |Foo|
3 |Boom|
Result: 4
1 |foo|
2 |  @   |
3 | @ |
4 |  @ |