...possible to open & display records of Non-Text files...

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Question by Satheesh Kumar
Submitted on 8/4/2003
Related FAQ: comp.lang.awk FAQ
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Is it possible to open & display records of Non-Text files using AWK? How?

Answer by obrienpx
Submitted on 8/21/2003
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I would be reluctant to say it is impossible but I do not know of any way. In my opinion it goes against the philosophy of the language. It is a (fairly) simple pattern matching language to manipulate text data in various ways. Default input is line-by-line which does not, in general, work for non-text files. But it may be possible in some variant of the language.

Answer by Gus
Submitted on 8/24/2004
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As long as you don't mean "open" the file in the windows sense (i.e. open for edit), sure, you can use awk to translate non-printable characters (or all characters) into a text form. For example, BEGIN { for (i=0; i<=255; i++) trans[sprintf("%c",i)]="&#"i";" } { for (i=1; i<=length($a); i++) printf "%s ",trans(substr($0,i,1)) } Converts all characters into the HTML "entities" used for unprintable characters. A more selective building of trans will allow you to leave printable characters alone. If you're working in a unix/linux environment, "od" might be a better choice.

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