Add double quotes around fields in AWK script output?

If you want:

add this to the existing script.

You can insert additional \"\" in each argument of print like this:

print "\"admin\"", "\"base\"", ...

Edited:

Yes, perhaps seting OFS is better solution:

BEGIN { OFS="\";\""; } ... print "\"admin", ...., "simple\"";

awk '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) $i="\""$i"\""}1' FS=";" OFS=";" input

To add quotes around the entries you could use a simple AWK loop:

Script - simple_loop.awk

BEGIN {FS=";"}
{
  for(i=1;i<NF;i++){
       printf("\"%s\";", $i); 
  }
  printf("\"%s\"\n",$NF);
}

For instance

echo "admin;base;5.11 HOLSTER SHIRT L WHITE;;" | awk -f simple_loop.awk

Should output

"admin";"base";"5.11 HOLSTER SHIRT L WHITE";"";""

In this case I would use a sed expression instead of AWK.

If your data is in a file called data.txt, you can get it writing:

sed "s/;/\";\"/g;s/^/\"/;s/$/\"/" data.txt

That will print the result to the std output, but if you want to replace the content of the file just use sed -i this way:

sed -i "s/;/\";\"/g;s/^/\"/;s/$/\"/" data.txt

And that is all !!

Explanation: The sed expression consists in three sed commands separated by ";" that you can run separately:

sed "s/;/\";\"/g

It makes a substitution (that is what means the first "s"), then the "/" (the default separator), ";" that is what we want to replace. Then the second separator "/", and the replacement: \";\" It is a sequence: escaped quote, a semicolon and a escaped quote. So with this command we will replace semicolons ; by ";". The last /g means that each ; will be replaced (not only the first smicolon).

If the input was a;b;c after this running the first command it will be a";"b";"c.

Now we need to add quotes in the beginning (^ in a regular expression) and in the end ($). So that is what it means:

sed "s/^/\"/" // the first quote

And

sed "s/$/\"/" // the last quote

Getting the desired output:

"a";"b";"c"