NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/lang/awk/10

Text File | 1993-01-21 | 1.8 KB | 68 lines

Newsgroups: alt.lang.awk
Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!geraldo.cc.utexas.edu!portal.austin.ibm.com!awdprime.austin.ibm.com!tbates
From: [e-mail] ()
Subject: Re: tolower() function?
Originator: [e-mail]
Sender: [e-mail] (News id)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 21:55:03 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: IBM Austin
Lines: 55


In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (hume smith) writes:
> In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Grant Totten) writes:
>
>    Is there a 'covert the line to lower case' function available in awk?
>    Or even 'convert to lower case except for the first character of the
>    line' function?
>
> gawk has tolower
> --
> Hume Smith                                    My name is little Bongo
> [e-mail]                         I sing my little song-go
> [e-mail]                                 Rhymes are hard to think of
>                                               Except for made-up words like "flong-go"

Quoting "The AWK Programming Language",

    "The cleanest way to do case conversion in awk is with an array that
maps each letter...it's better to use...tr"

I often use tr for this very reason. For example:

    echo "HeLlO, wOrLd!" | tr [:upper:] [:lower]

This gives you:

    hello, world!

To use tr from awk:

#!/bin/awk -f
   {
   "echo "$0" | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]" | getline
   print
}

To skip the first character:

#!/bin/awk -f
   {
   start_of_line=$0
   rest_of_line=$0
   start_of_line=substr($0,1,1)
   rest_of_line=substr($0,2)
   "echo " rest_of_line " | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]" | getline rest_of_line
   print start_of_line rest_of_line
}

    Sincerely,
        Tom
--
Tom Bates

IBM Austin