stringawknewlinestdinstring-substitution

Substite newlines with a string with awk

I need to parse stdin in the following way:

(1) all newlines characters must be substituted with \n (a literal \ followed by n)

(2) nothing else should be performed except the previous

I chose awk to do it, and I would like an answer that uses awk if possible.

I came up with:

echo -ne "A\nB\nC" | awk '{a[NR]=$0;} END{for(i=1;i<NR;i++){printf "%s\\n",a[i];};printf "%s",a[NR];}'

But it looks cumbersome.

Is there a better / cleaner way?

Solution

  • With awk:

    echo -ne "A\nB\nC" | awk 'BEGIN{FS="\n"; OFS="\\n"; RS=ORS=""} {$1=$1}1'

    Output:

    A\nB\nC

    See: 8 Powerful Awk Built-in Variables – FS, OFS, RS, ORS, NR, NF, FILENAME, FNR