Vtyjkyuk

in the input fields are separated by pipe sign:

CCCC|Sess C1|s1 DA=yy07:@##;/u/t/we
DDDDD|Sess C2|s4 DB=yy8:@##;/u/ba

I want to get output where last field is changed (extracted only what is between first = and : in this field

expected output is:

CCCC|Sess C1|yy07
DDDDD|Sess C2|yy8

standard awk is not very good at extracting data out of fields based on patterns. Some options include:

• 
  split() to split the text into an array based on specified delimiters.


• 
  match() which sets the RSTART and RLENGTH variables to indicate where the match occurred, and then use subtr() to extract the matched portion.

So here:

awk -F'|' -v OFS='|' '
 split($3, a, /[=:]/) >= 2 print $1, $2, a[2]' < file.txt

So returns the portion between the first and second occurrence of a = or : in $3.

Or:

awk -F'|' -v OFS='|' '
 match($3, /=[^:]*/) 
 print $1, $2, substr($3, RSTART+1, RLENGTH-1)
 ' < file.txt

GNU awk has a gensub() extension which brings the functionality of sed's s command into awk:

gawk -F'|' -v OFS='|' '
 $3 ~ /=/ 
 print $1, $2, gensub(/^[^=]*=([^:]*).*/, "\1", 1, $3)
 ' < file.txt

Looks for = followed by any number of non-:s and extracts the part after =. The problem with gensub() is that you can't easily tell if the substitution was successful or not, hence the check that $3 contains = first.

With sed:

sed -n 's/^([^|]*|[^|]*|)[^=|]*=([^:|]*).*/12/p' < file.txt

With perl:

perl -F'[|]' -lane 'print "$F[0]|$F[1]|$1" if $F[2] =~ /=([^:]*)/' < file.txt

I would try

awk -F| 'BEGIN OFS=" 
 col=index($3,":"); 
 equ=index($3,"=");
 $3=substr($3,equ+1,col-equ-1); 
 print ; ' se

where

• 
  -F| tell awk to use | as input separator


• 
  equ=index($3,"="); get index of = in third field


• 
  $3=substr($3,equ+1,col-equ-1); do actual substitution

The first sub removes the first sixth characters in field 3 and second sub
removes everything after colon including.

awk -F| 'sub(/.6/,"",$3)sub(/:.*/,"")1' OFS=| file