Overview

Jawk is a pure Java implementation of AWK^[1]. You can run AWK programs in a JVM application and integrate with your Java code:

$ echo "hello world" | java -jar jawk-6.4.00-standalone.jar '{ print $2 ", " $1 "!" }'
world, hello!

Awk awk = new Awk();
String result = awk.script("{ print toupper($0) }").input("hello world").execute();
// result = "HELLO WORLD\n"

Compatibility and Compliance

The above scores are calculated from the latest compatibility tests during mvn verify site. See the full compatibility dashboard^[2] for per-suite maps and the Failsafe report^[3] for detailed test results.

Key Capabilities

• CLI-compatible AWK execution with inline scripts, script files, operands, and input files
• Java entry points for script execution, expression evaluation, tuple compilation, and repeated reuse
• Structured input through InputSource for row-oriented or already-tokenized data
• Explicit extension loading through the Java API or the CLI
• Tuple serialization for CLI precompilation and later loading
• Sandbox-specific tuples and runtime components through SandboxedAwk

Differences with Traditional AWK

Jawk aims to be a practical AWK implementation for JVM environments, but it is not a byte-for-byte clone of every historical AWK behavior. Some differences are deliberate and come from the way Jawk integrates with Java:

• Regular expression behavior follows Java's regex engine, which may differ from traditional AWK regexes in edge cases.
• printf() and sprintf() try to replicate C-style formatting but may have differences due to Java's formatting capabilities and limitations.
• Some floating-point edge cases may differ due to Java's handling of floating-point arithmetic and representation.
• Jawk resolves user-defined function calls during compilation. It does not defer all of that work to runtime.

History of Jawk

Next Steps

• Install Jawk^[17]
• Embed Jawk in Java^[18]
• Learn the CLI^[19]
• Work with variables and arguments^[20]
• Work with structured input^[21]
• Compile, evaluate, and reuse tuples^[22]
• Load or write extensions^[23]