Question

I have the string:

20120113083000Z

and I want to convert it to:

2012 01 13 08 30 00 Z

ready for the mktime command to convert it to a date stamp.

I have at present:

echo '20120113083000Z' |    
awk '{print mktime(gensub(/(....)(..)(..)(..)(..)(..)(.)/,"\\1 \\2 \\3 \\4 \\5 \\6 \\7",1g,$1))}'
1326439800

I know I could use sed or bash to convert it, but I would like to keep it inside an awk process.

Is there a better (shorter or more elegant) way?

N.B. I would like to make it as generic as possible (gensub gawk only(?)).

Answer 1

$ echo 20120113083000 |  sed 's/../& /g; s/ //' | awk '{print mktime($0)}'
$ echo 20120113083000 |  awk '{print mktime(gensub(/ /, "", "1", gensub(/../, "& ", "g")))}'