In a previous discussion about awk, the user comex made a wish that I strongly desire as well:
"I wish Awk had capture groups. It would fit in so well with typical Awk one-liners to be able to say:
awk '/foo=([0-9]+)/ { print $1 }'
I use Awk all the time, and the new additions in the article are pretty nice; but for typical uses of Awk, the feature comex wants would make a tremendous difference in usability.
Anything too big to be coded with AWK should be done in Perl. Nothing bad about that. Perl it's almost a sed/awk/sh replacement when shell scripting based code gets clunky.
Absolutely nothing should be done with Perl, it is 2023.
If you're jonesing for a sed replacement (it even has capture groups) try: https://github.com/chmln/sd
Worth being aware of: