Extract Column(s) from text file having Multi Character Delimiter i.e. “%$%”

I have tried different solution for the problem given on the forum but doesn’t work for the specified Delimiter %$%, I need to extract one specific column from the file containing 200+ columns.

I tried the following:

awk -F"%$%" '{print $1}' sample.txt > outfile.txt
awk 'gsub("%$%",":")' sample.txt > outfile.txt

Answer

The symbol $ is a special character in a regex, so you need to escape it with a , which is also a special character for the string literal, so it needs to be escaped again.

So, finally we have:

$ cat sample 
ghkjlj;lk%$%23e;k32poek%$%eqdje2oijd%$%xrgtdy5h

$ awk -F'%\$%' '{print $1}' sample 
ghkjlj;lk