Is there any way to encode Multiple columns in a csv using base64 in Shell? - encoding

Question

I have a requirement to replace multiple columns of a csv file with its base64 encoding value which should be applied to some columns of the file but keep the first line unaffected as the first line contains the header of the file. I have tried out for 1 column as below but as I have given it to proceed after skipping the first line of the file it is not
gawk 'BEGIN { FS="|"; OFS="|" } NR >=2 { cmd="echo "$4" | base64 -w 0";cmd | getline x;close(cmd); print $1,$2,$3,x}' awktest
o/p:
12|A|B|Qw==
13|C|D|RQ==
36|Z|V|VQ==
Qs: It is not showing the header in the output. What should I do to make produce the header in the output? Also can I use any loop here to replace multiple columns?
input:
10|A|B|C|5|T|R
12|A|B|C|6|eee|ff
13|C|D|E|9|dr|xrdd
36|Z|V|U|7|xc|xd
Required output:
10|A|B|C|5|T|R
12|A|B|encodedvalue|6|encodedvalue|ff
13|C|D|encodedvalue|9|encodedvalue|xrdd
36|Z|V|encodedvalue|7|encodedvalue|xd
Is this possible? Have researched a lot but could not find a proper explanation. I am new to shell. Kindly help. Many thanks!!!!

Answer 1

It looks like you can just sequence conditionals. This may not be the best way of solving the header issue, but it's intuitive.
BEGIN { FS="|"; OFS="|" } NR ==1 {print} NR >=2 { cmd="echo "$4" | base64 -w 0";cmd | getline x;close(cmd); print $1,$2,$3,x}
As for using a loop to affect multiple columns... Loops in bash are hard. Awk is technically its own language, and may have a looping construct of it's own, IDK. But it's not clear you need a loop. If there's only a reasonable number of fields that need modifying, you can just parameterize the existing command (somehow) by the field index, and then pipe through however many instances of it. It won't be as performant as doing it all in a single pass of awk, but that's probably ok.