Issue parsing | as field separator?

[shah]

I have a simple program:

package main
import (
	"fmt"
	"bytes"
	"github.com/benhoyt/goawk/interp"
)

func main() {
	input := bytes.NewReader([]byte("xyz title | Healthcare IT News"))
	err := interp.Exec(" $0 { print $1}", "|", input, nil)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
		return
	}
}

The output produces:
x

Instead of:
xyz title

Any idea why the "|" is not being parsed properly? If I use comma or hyphen, it works.

[benhoyt]

Oh, interesting! I'm very surprised I haven't run into this before. What's going on is that I'm always treating FS as a regular expression (| is an "or" regex), when in fact other awks (and the POSIX spec) say that if FS is a single character, treat it as a literal single character, otherwise treat it as a regex. I'll fix this behavior.

[benhoyt]

Thanks for the bug report, BTW. In the meantime you can use the workaround of setting FS to \\|, for example: https://play.golang.org/p/rqp_CxkVJT9

[niemeyer]

if FS is a single character, treat it as a literal single character, otherwise treat it as a regex. I'll fix this behavior.

There are more special cases, unfortunately: the single space, and the empty/null string is unspecified but actually specified for gawk.

[benhoyt]

@niemeyer Thanks. Yes, I'm already handling the single space. And I handle empty string as per awk.