How to remove escape character in awk?

Question

I am trying to concat two strings in awk. One of them seems to contain '\\r':

stringA = "Hello\r"
stringB = "Hi"
print stringA stringB

results in

Hillo

What can I do to remove the '\\r' if I can't change the source of stringA?

Thanks :)

Answer 1

Given:

$ awk 'BEGIN {s1="Hello\r"; s2="Hi"; print s1 s2}'
Hillo

Just replace the carriage return \\r with gsub() :

$ awk 'BEGIN {s1="Hello\r"; s2="Hi"; gsub(/\r$/,"",s1); print s1 s2}'
HelloHi

That is, gsub(/\\r$/,"",s1) looks for the \\r at the end of the string s1 and replaces it with "" , that is, it removes it.

If multiple carriage returns appear, just get rid of the $ so that it doesn't just match the one at the end of the line.

Ed Morton suggests in comments that probably just one carriage return will appear in a string, which is quite reasonable. If this is the case, just use sub() instead: sub(/\\r$/,"",s1) .