[regex] AWK: Access captured group from line pattern

If I have an awk command

pattern { ... }

and pattern uses a capturing group, how can I access the string so captured in the block?

With gawk, you can use the match function to capture parenthesized groups.

gawk 'match($0, pattern, ary) {print ary[1]}' 

example:

echo "abcdef" | gawk 'match($0, /b(.*)e/, a) {print a[1]}' 

outputs cd.

Note the specific use of gawk which implements the feature in question.

For a portable alternative you can achieve similar results with match() and substr.

example:

echo "abcdef" | awk 'match($0, /b[^e]*/) {print substr($0, RSTART+1, RLENGTH-1)}'

outputs cd.

This is something I need all the time so I created a bash function for it. It's based on glenn jackman's answer.

Definition

Add this to your .bash_profile etc.

function regex { gawk 'match($0,/'$1'/, ary) {print ary['${2:-'0'}']}'; }

Usage

Capture regex for each line in file

$ cat filename | regex '.*'

Capture 1st regex capture group for each line in file

$ cat filename | regex '(.*)' 1

You can simulate capturing in vanilla awk too, without extensions. Its not intuitive though:

step 1. use gensub to surround matches with some character that doesnt appear in your string. step 2. Use split against the character. step 3. Every other element in the splitted array is your capture group.

$ echo 'ab cb ad' | awk '{ split(gensub(/a./,SUBSEP"&"SUBSEP,"g",$0),cap,SUBSEP); print cap[2]"|" cap[4] ; }'
ab|ad

I struggled a bit with coming up with a bash function that wraps Peter Tillemans' answer but here's what I came up with:

function regex { perl -n -e "/$1/ && printf \"%s\n\", "'$1' }

I found this worked better than opsb's awk-based bash function for the following regular expression argument, because I do not want the "ms" to be printed.

'([0-9]*)ms$'

You can use GNU awk:

$ cat hta
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mysite\.net$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.net/$1 [R=301,L]

$ gawk 'match($0, /.*(http.*?)\$/, m) { print m[1]; }' < hta
http://www.mysite.net/