🚀 go-pugleaf

tbates@austin.ibm.com () writes:


>Quoting "The AWK Programming Language",

>	"The cleanest way to do case conversion in awk is with an array that
>maps each letter...it's better to use...tr"

It certainly is cleaner, but not every system which has awk also has
tr.

For the heck of it, I timed converting a 200 K text file to all upper
with an awk - script with self - written toup - function,and tr, on a HP
9000/720 (not exactly a slow machine :-)

Here are the results:

$ time tr [[:lower:]] [[:upper:]] < faq.linux >/dev/null

real    0m0.33s
user    0m0.16s
sys     0m0.07s

$ time toupper < faq.linux >/dev/null

real    0m33.32s
user    0m32.12s
sys     0m0.07s

$ cat toupper
#! /usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN	{
	    a="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"; b="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUWVXYZ"
	    for (i=1; i<=length(a); i++)
	        touptab[substr(a,i,1)] = substr(b,i,1)
	}
	{ print toup($0) }
function toup(a     ,i ,ch ,res)
{
    res = ""
    for (i=1; i<=length(a); i++)
    {
	ch = substr(a,i,1)
	if (ch in touptab)
	    res = res touptab[ch]
	else
	    res = res ch
    }
return res
}

Which again shows...  leave the stuff which can be handeled by more
specialized utilities to these, and only use awk when you really need
it.

Regards
-- 
Thomas Koenig, ig25@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de, ig25@dkauni2.bitnet
The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double
logarithmic diagram.