Data exploration with awk
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Filtering data

Extract columns

The first thing to know about awk is that it operates on rows and columns, also known as records and fields, respectively.

To extract the 3rd column of orders.tsv, we can use the print command and use $n to represent the nth column:

awk '{ print $3 }' orders.tsv | head

Note that print $0 (or just print) refers to the entire line:

awk '{ print $0 }' orders.tsv | head

Awk also provides built-in variables: for example, NF (number of fields) tells you how many columns there are on the current line. In turn, $NF means fetch the last column of the file:

awk '{ print $NF }' orders.tsv | head

Let’s now extract columns 2 and 3 to obtain the items ordered and the quantity for each:

awk '{ print $2, $3 }' orders.tsv | head

Note, however, that when you compare the output of the command above to , it seems the item_name column is truncated! This is because by default, awk treats tabs and spaces both as column delimiters, so we have to explicitly tell it we have tab-separated data:

awk -F "\t" '{ print $2, $3 }' orders.tsv | head
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