Tabbing the printed fields evenly using awk

Question

i need help using awk. Thanks

i have a file it contains the following

text.txt  
The Hunger Games:Suzanne Collins:1:2:3
Weapon X:Stan Lee:3:4:5

the code that i was using to print the lines

awk -F '[:]' '{print $1, $2 ,"$"$3, $4 , $5 }' BookDB.txt 

i wish for the out put to become like this

The Hunger Games     Suzanne Collins      1     2     3
Weapon X             Stan Lee             3     4     5

Answer 1

Try this to get tab spacings as in your example:

awk -F: '{if(NR==2)$2="\t"$2;print $1, $2, $3, $4, $5}' OFS="\t" BookDB.txt

Setting : as field seperator and \t as output field seperator. Then for the second line (NR==2), add one extra tab for the second field. Then print the fields.

Or even simpler (if it is acceptable for you):

sed "s/:/\t/g" BookDB.txt

Answer 2

You can pipe awk output to column like this:

awk -F ':' -v OFS=':' '{print $1, $2 , $3, $4 , $5}' BookDB.txt | column -s ':' -t
The Hunger Games  Suzanne Collins  1  2  3
Weapon X          Stan Lee         3  4  5

Answer 3

The output you show is not tab-separated, it's formatted as a table and for that all you need is:

$ column -t -s: file
The Hunger Games  Suzanne Collins  1  2  3
Weapon X          Stan Lee         3  4  5

If you really wanted it to be tab-separated then that'd be:

$ tr ':' '\t' < file
The Hunger Games        Suzanne Collins 1       2       3
Weapon X        Stan Lee        3       4       5

If you wanted specific fields:

$ cut -d':' -f 1,4 file | column -t -s:
The Hunger Games  2
Weapon X          4

$ cut -d':' -f 1,4 file | tr ':' '\t'
The Hunger Games        2
Weapon X        4

$ awk -F':' -v OFS='\t' '{print $1, $4}' file
The Hunger Games        2
Weapon X        4

If you don't have column but want tabular output, you can do it all in awk:

$ cat tst.awk
BEGIN { FS = ":"; ARGV[ARGC] = ARGV[ARGC-1]; ARGC++ }
{
    for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
        if (NR==FNR)
            width[i] = (length($i) > width[i] ? length($i) : width[i])
        else
            printf "%-*s%s", width[i], $i, (i<NF?OFS:ORS)
}

$ awk -f tst.awk file
The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins 1 2 3
Weapon X         Stan Lee        3 4 5