Question

I am looking for a command which would get the result of whether there is a space present in the variable or not in awk. I am not looking for

 split(variable,array," ") 

and then traversing this array to find it .. I am looking for a more efficient way . Could anyone guide me regarding this. Thank you.

Answer 1

You could use the awk index() string function to search for a target string:

$ awk 'BEGIN{var="ga p";if(index(var," ")>0) print "Space"; else print "No space"}'
Space

$ awk 'BEGIN{var="gap";if(index(var," ")>0) print "Space"; else print "No space"}'
No space

From the docs above:

index(in, find)

This searches the string in for the first occurrence of the string
find, and returns the position in characters where that occurrence
begins in the string in. .. If find is not found, index returns 0.