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  • I do appreciate the answer and I'll lean a lot about awk from this, but I'd really rather a solution that did not try to do the math involved because the number formats are far more complex than this simplistic example. I have different commodities with localized formats including thousand separators is some that are decimal separators in others, RTL scripts in the units, etc. I'd rather not try to validate a round trip between localized and normalized formats. Commented Jun 27, 2019 at 7:25
  • @Caleb in that case, how can I determine that the number is negative? Would just checking for - in the number be sufficient? Or do you have negative numbers that use the financial way (50) instead of -50? Commented Jun 27, 2019 at 7:29
  • Good question. And actually yes, matching - anywhere in the amount field is sufficient, that is universal although it's position in the amount changes with localization. Commented Jun 27, 2019 at 7:31
  • Thanks, and thanks for the code comments! It's actually a lot more convoluted in awk than I expected when I asked this and I'm not sure if I wouldn't have been better off just writing a parsing script, but it does what I wanted and I learned a few things along the way. Commented Jun 27, 2019 at 7:56
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    @Caleb usually awk ignores leading spaces, but not when you set a custom FS. So $1 and $2 would now actually be $2 and $3 (the first field being empty). Commented Jun 27, 2019 at 10:54