Question

I am using the awk’s concept of storing the values as a subscript/Index of an array. Please have a look at the code below

stringVariable="hi,bye,cool.hot,how,see";
split(stringVariable,stringArray,",");

#This loop will iterate and stores the RIDs in the requestIds variable into an array
for(tr=1;tr<=length(stringArray);tr++)
{
Count++;
    referenceIdArray[stringArray[tr]]++;
}

So in my referenceId array I will be having hi,bye,cool,hot,how,see

let me consider a sample file which has the following values

hi
bye
gone

My aim is to get the values from the file and to match with the array declared previously and if any of the values matches print the value from a file

awk script

awk '{BEGIN (Array loading done previously)} {if($0 in referenceIdArray) {print $0}}'

So this will give me the desired result. But assuming that the “hi” will appear only once in an array and hence when the action block finds the value, the value should be printed and also the corresponding entry in the array which is referenceIdArray[“hi”] should also be removed in order to make the search effecient. Since they are stored as subscript I am not sure how to remove the entry. Any suggesions regarding this. Thank you.

Answer 1

You can remove an individual element of an array using the delete statement:

delete array[index]

ref: http://www.math.utah.edu/docs/info/gawk_12.html