title: Split string in AWK using multi-character delimiter
body: <p>I have the following delimiter and string:</p>
  
  <pre><code>DEL=":::"
  STR="info1"$DEL"info2"$DEL"info3"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to extract info1-2-3 from STR using awk.</p>
  
  <p>The following works:</p>
  
  <pre><code>info1=$(echo $STR | awk '{split($0,a,":::")} END{print a[1]}')
  info2=$(echo $STR | awk '{split($0,a,":::")} END{print a[2]}')
  info3=$(echo $STR | awk '{split($0,a,":::")} END{print a[3]}')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The following does NOT work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>info1=$(echo $STR | awk '{split($0,a,"$DEL")} END{print a[1]}')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What's wrong?</p>