An Awk Primer/Numbers and Strings

Numbers Numbers can be expressed in Awk as either decimal integers or floating-point quantities. For example: 789 3.141592654 +67 +4.6E3 -34 -2.1e-2 There is no provision for specifying values in other bases, such as hex or octal; however, as will be shown later, it is possible to output them from Awk in hex or octal format. Strings Strings are expressed in double quotes. For example: "All work and no play makes Jack a homicidal maniac!" "1987A1" "do re mi fa so la ti do" Awk also supports null strings, which are represented by empty quotes: "". right Like the C programming language, it is possible in Awk to specify a character by its three-digit octal code (preceded by a backslash). There are various "special" characters that can be embedded into strings: \n Newline (line feed) \t Horizontal tab (aligns to next column of 8 spaces) \b Backspace \r Carriage return \f Form feed (possibly causes a new page, if printing) A double-quote (") can be embedded in a string by preceding it with a backslash, and a backslash can be embedded in a string by typing it in twice: \\. If a backslash is used with other characters (say, \m), it is simply treated as a normal character.