I want to replace the inner single quote (ignoring the outer single quote) with an inverted question mark (¿). I am using below awk command, but it's not working. Semicolon is the separator character.
awk -F "'" -v OFS="'" '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i+=2) gsub("'","\302\277", $i } 1' filename
And the data is:
'gasg'dhsh';'dhdjs'
To replace all single quotes that are flanked by words with ¿ in a file (assuming bash is used, so that we may use $'...'):
q=$'\302\277'
sed "s/\>'\</$q/g" file
Alternatively
q=$( printf '\302\277' )
sed "s/\>'\</$q/g" file
or
sed "s/\>'\</¿/g" file
With the given input, this would produce
'gasg¿dhsh';'dhdjs'
The pattern \>'\< would match any ' that has a word character immediately before and after. The ; character and start/end of line are not word characters, while both g and d are.
Your code has three main issues:
A single quoted string in the shell may never contain a single quote. The embedded single quote in the call to gsub() will end the single quoted string that is the awk code, producing a syntax error.
Setting the input field separator to a single quote using -F "'" will cause awk to split the input on all single quotes. This means that the awk program will never see any single quotes, and your gsub() will therefore never replace anything.
The string \302\277 is not an inverted question mark, unless interpreted as an escape sequence.
Correcting all of these issues would make the program work, but it would replace all occurrences of single quotes:
$ awk -F ';' -v OFS=';' '{ for (i=1; i<=NF; ++i) gsub("'"'"'", sprintf("\302\277"), $i); print }' file
¿gasg¿dhsh¿;¿dhdjs¿
$'\302\277' in bash? Isn't a simple ¿ better? It does not assume utf-8.
¿ in the terminal I was working at while initially writing the answer.
Assuming that by "Inner single quote" you imply that there are "outer single quotes" and also assuming that those outer qoutes are at the start and end of each field (delimited by ";" ín this case) you can use:
$ awk -F ';' '{OFS=FS;for(j=1;j<=NF;j++){gsub(q,i,$j);sub("^"i,q,$j);sub(i"$",q,$j)}}{print}' q='\047' i='¿'
'gasg¿dhsh';'dhdjs'
'as a delimiter, the data, once you parse it, will not contain any'.'in the argument togsub()will end the text of theawkprogram, since the program is single quoted.