Problem (multiline records) with gawk 3.0.6

[Volker Kiefel]

Possible bug in gawk v3.0.6

 

Hello dear maintainer(s) of GAWK,
hello Arnold Robbins,

 

Thank you for the excellent GAWK tool which I often use
(under Windows 95 SE) instead of commercial spreadsheet
software.  Recently I encountered some problems in an
attempt to process multiple line records. The problem is
best exemplified with the example in "Effective
AWK-programming" (chapter 5.7: multiple-line
records). The data file:

 

Jane Doe
123 Main Street
Anywhere, SE 12345-6789

 

John Smith
456 Tree-lined Avenue
Smallville, MW 98765-4321

 

is processed with the AWK script

 

BEGIN {
    RS = ""; FS = "\n"
}

 

{
    print "Name is: ", $1
    print "Address is: ", $2
    print "City and State are: ", $3
    print ""
}

 

A problem arises with one leading newline (empty line)
in the "addresses" data file before "Jane Doe", the
(unexpected) output is:

 

Name is: 
Address is:  Jane Doe
City and State are:  123 Main Street

 

Name is:  John Smith
Address is:  456 Tree-lined Avenue
City and State are:  Smallville, MW 98765-4321

 

i. e. there is a shift in output in the first record.
With RS="" leading empty lines should not influence the
result. 0 or 2 leading lines produce the expected
result:

 

Name is:  Jane Doe
Address is:  123 Main Street
City and State are:  Anywhere, SE 12345-6789

 

Name is:  John Smith
Address is:  456 Tree-lined Avenue
City and State are:  Smallville, MW 98765-4321

 

Kerninghan's AWK in its current version does not show
this unexpected behaviour.

 

I use gawk v5.0.6 compiled with the mingw32
implementation of the GCC (v2.95.2) and with the
djgpp-implementation of GCC. Can this problem be
addressed in a future version of GAWK?

 

Yours sincerely
  Volker Kiefel
(Rostock, Germany)