for awk experts only.

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:59:51 -0800, Gary Kline <kline at thought.org> wrote:
> 	wordnet/wn prints the string "noun" out whereas I'd rather it simply
> 	printed "n."  Is there a way of making this substitution using awk?
> 	(I've never used awk except as a cmdline filter.)
>
> 	The following fails:
>
> wn foot -over |grep Overview |awk
> {if(!strcmp($3,"noun"))$3="n."; '{printf("%s %s\n", $4, $3);}}'
>
> 	If there are any shortcuts, please clue me in!

Don't do this with a long stream of if/else/.../else blocks.  AWK is a
pattern based rule-language.  You can apply different blocks of code to
lines that match patterns like this:

    $3 ~ /adjective/ { print $1,"adj." }
    $3 ~ /noun/      { print $1,"n." }
    $3 ~ /verb/      { print $1,"v." }