GoAWK now uses a bytecode compiler and includes native support for CSV files. AWK is a fascinating text processing language, and The AWK Programming Language is a wonderfully concise book describing it. The A, W, and K in AWK stand for the surnames of the three original creators: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. Kernighan is also an author of The C Programming Language (“K&R”), and the two books have that same each-page-packs-a-punch feel. AWK was released in 1977, which makes it over 40 years old! Not bad for a domain-specific language that’s still used for one-liners on Unix command lines everywhere. GoAWK is a POSIX-compatible version of AWK, and additionally has a CSV mode for reading and writing CSV and TSV files. This feature was sponsored by the library of the University of Antwerp. Read the CSV documentation.
Features
- To use the command-line version, simply use go install to install it
- To use it in your Go programs, you can call interp.Exec() directly for simple needs
- It has proper support for CSV and TSV files
- It's the only AWK implementation we know with a code coverage feature
- It supports negative field indexes to access fields from the right
- It's embeddable in your Go programs
- Most AWK scripts are faster than awk and on a par with gawk, though usually slower than mawk
Project Samples
