awk select part of column (3rd of 3 characters)

Question

I have a number of files where I select some columns with the following

cat test.txt | awk ' {
if ($11 ~ /229/ && $5 ~ /1A1/) 
{print $0, ($3 + 1) }         
if ($11 ~ /229/ && $5 ~ /1A2/) 
{print $0, ($3 - 1) }
if ($11 ~ /49/ && $5 ~ /1A1/)  
{print $0, ($3 - 1)}
if ($11 ~ /49/ && $5 ~ /1A2/)
{print $0, ($3 + 1) }
}' > output

The problem is that some files might have different letter for 1A1 or 1A2 such as 1K1 , 1K2 ..... I would like to make the condition $5 ~(/1A2/) or $5 ~(/1A1/) more "general" and I tried things like

$5 ~(/??1/)
$5 ~(/??2/)

So far no success. Can anyone help me on that? Please note that I need to keep also the selection criteria in $11

cat test.txt | awk ' {
    if ($11 ~ /229/ && $5 ~ /??1/)
....

Answer 1

You should try with regular expressions, in this case you can use this simple awk program:

awk ' {
if ($11 ~ /(229|49)/ && $5 ~ /1[A-Z][1-2]/) 
{print $0, ($3 + 1) }}' test.txt > output

I'm assuming that:

• Second character in $5 is any Capital/Mayus Letter( [AZ] ),
• Third character in $5 is 1 or 2 ( [1-2] )
• $11 only can be 229 or 49