The conversion to string and numeric values occurs automatically in AWK as per demand. When any expression is built using any operator and operand, if the expression has a numeric value but the operator demands a string value, then the numeric value is automatically converted into a string and vice versa. If a numeric value appears in a string concatenation, it is converted to a string.
For example, in the following example, variables a and b are converted to strings first and then concatenated together. The resulting string is again converted back to number 45, in which 4 is further added, and we get the output of the number 49:
$ vi str2num.awk
BEGIN {
a=4; b=5;
print ( a b ) + 4 ;
}
$ awk -f str2num.awk
The output of the execution of the preceding code is as follows:
49
Any string can be forcefully converted to a number by adding...
