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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T16:30:23+00:00

For learning purposes I am implementing a little regexp matcher for telephone numbers. My

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For learning purposes I am implementing a little regexp matcher for telephone numbers. My goal is readability, not the shortest possible gawk program:

# should match
#1234567890
#123-456-7890
#123.456.7890
#(123)456-7890
#(123) 456-7890 

BEGIN{
    regexp="[0-9]{10},[0-9]{3}[-.][0-9]{3}[.-][0-9]{4},\\([0-9]{3}\\) ?[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}"
    len=split(regexp,regs,/,/)
}
{for (i=1;i<=len;i++)
    if ($0 ~ regs[i]) print $0
}

For better readability I would like to split the line regexp="... on several lines like:

regexp="[0-9]{10}
       ,[0-9]{3}[-.][0-9]{3}[.-][0-9]{4}
       ,\\([0-9]{3}\\) ?[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}"

Is there an easy way to do this in awk?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The concensus seems to be that there is no simple way to split multiline strings without disturbing awk? Thanks for the other ideas, but make me as the programmer do the work of the computer what i don’t enjoy. So i came up with this solution, which in my opinion is pretty close to a kind of executable specification. I use the base and here documents and process redicrection to create the files for awk on the fly:

    #!/bin/bash

# numbers that should be matched
read -r -d '' VALID <<'valid'
1234567890
123-456-7890
123.456.7890
(123)456-7890
(123) 456-7890 
valid
# regexp patterns that should match
read -r -d '' PATTERNS <<'patterns'
[0-9]{10}
[0-9]{3}\.[0-9]{3}\.[0-9]{4}
[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}
\([0-9]{3}\) ?[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}
patterns

gawk --re-interval 'NR==FNR{reg[FNR]=$0;next}
  {for (i in reg) 
    if ($0 ~ reg[i]) print $0}' <(echo "$PATTERNS") <(echo "$VALID")

    Any comments are welcome.

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