How to escape a single quote inside awk

Question

I want do the following

awk 'BEGIN {FS=" ";} {printf "'%s' ", $1}'

But escaping single quote this way does not work

awk 'BEGIN {FS=" ";} {printf "'%s' ", $1}'

How to do this? Thanks for help.

Answer 1

This maybe what you're looking for:

awk 'BEGIN {FS=" ";} {printf "'''%s''' ", $1}'

That is, with ''' you close the opening ', then print a literal ' by escaping it and finally open the ' again.