FPAT patch for gawk

[Aharon Robbins]

I just posted the following to comp.lang.awk:

    From: address@hidden (Arnold Robbins)
    Newsgroups: comp.lang.awk
    Subject: A winter present for all you gawk fans
    Message-ID: <address@hidden>

    Greetings everyone.  After all the endless posts on CSV data, I decided to
    whip up a present for all the loyal awk/gawk fans out there, to help
    you get through these dreary winter days.

    In particular, I added FPAT to gawk.  Based on the idea (only! no code)
    from Thompson awk, you assign a string containing a regular expression
    to FPAT, and then gawk sets the fields to be the text that matches
    the regular expression.  If FPAT is null or doesn't match, $1 is set
    to the whole record.

    Included in the patch (in the gawk.texi file) is an example program for
    parsing (at least one kind of) CSV.  It's rather neat, even if I say
    so myself. (:-)

    The patch is provided against 3.1.0.  This will eventually go into
    the 3.2 source tree, but I thought I'd release it early to give everyone
    something to play with, and to get any feedback on either the code
    or the documentation.  In the meantime, I'gm working on 3.1.1, which will
    be a bugfix release.

    ftp://freefriends.org/arnold/Awkstuff/gawk-3.1.0-FPAT.patch.gz is
    where to get the patch from. (Sorry, no pre-built binaries and no
    full distribution. You'll have to apply the patch and rebuild from
    source.)

    Enjoy,

    Arnold Robbins