No escape needed for period with gensub

[Robert Mesibov]

With gawk 4.1.1, a period character doesn't need escaping to make it literal:

$ echo "a . b" | awk '{print gensub(/ . /,".",$0)}'
a.b

A period is listed as a metacharacter in the GNU AWK manual, so why doesn't it need to be escaped?

[Kenny McCormack]

In article <43b584a7-409b-413c...@googlegroups.com>,

Two comments:
1) Your 3rd parameter to gensub() is wrong. It should be 1.

2) Your assumption is wrong. Your reg exp / . / matches a space
followed by any character followed by another space. This 3
character sequence occurs just once in "a . b".

$ echo "a X b" | gawk '{print gensub(/ . /,".",1)}'
a.b
$

--
I'm building a wall.

[Robert Mesibov]

On Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 6:49:44 PM UTC+10, Kenny McCormack wrote:
> Two comments:
> 1) Your 3rd parameter to gensub() is wrong. It should be 1.

Oops. My mistake, the demo was hastily built from a longer non-demo command.

>
> 2) Your assumption is wrong. Your reg exp / . / matches a space
> followed by any character followed by another space. This 3
> character sequence occurs just once in "a . b".
>

Many thanks, I hadn't thought of it that way.