Replacing pattern after nth match is found on each line?

I have a file containing lines:

india;austria;japan;chile
china;US;nigeria;mexico;russia

I want to replace all the occurences of semicolon on each line with e.g. ;NEW;, but starting from the 2nd occurence only. The result should look like this:

india;austria;NEW;japan;NEW;chile
china;US;NEW;nigeria;NEW;mexico;NEW;russia

I tried this with gsub, but it replaces all the occurences:
awk '/;/{gsub(/;/,";NEW;") }{print}'

Answers:

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Method 1

The awk solution is much longer, but is easier to make it generic:

awk -F; '{for(i=1;i<NF;i++)printf"%s;%s",$i,(i>=2)?"NEW;":"";print$NF}' replacefile

Is possible to do it with sed too, making a loop with the t command and always replacing the 2nd (or whichever you want) separator into some temporary mark (usually n):

sed ':b;s/;/n/2;tb;s/n/;NEW;/g' replacefile

Method 2

There’s a flag for GNU sed’s s/// command that does this:

sed 's/;/;NEW;/2g' <<END
india;austria;japan;chile
china;US;nigeria;mexico;russia
END

outputs

india;austria;NEW;japan;NEW;chile
china;US;NEW;nigeria;NEW;mexico;NEW;russia

See https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html#The-_0022s_0022-Command

The s command can be followed by zero or more of the following flags:

g

Apply the replacement to all matches to the regexp, not just the first.

number

Only replace the numberth match of the regexp.
Note: the posix standard does not specify what should happen when you mix the g and number modifiers, and currently there is no widely agreed upon meaning across sed implementations. For GNU sed, the interaction is defined to be: ignore matches before the numberth, and then match and replace all matches from the numberth on.

…

(emphasis mine)

Method 3

I’d do this in two steps:

First, replace all semicolons with ;NEW;:

sed -e s/;/;NEW;/g

Then replace the first ;NEW; with a semicolon:

sed -e s/;NEW;/;/

You can use a pipe to do both replaces on one line. Here’s an example:

$ more replacefile 
india;austria;japan;chile;
china;US;nigeria;mexico;russia
$ cat replacefile |sed -e s/;/;NEW;/g  |sed -e s/;NEW;/;/
india;austria;NEW;japan;NEW;chile;NEW;
china;US;NEW;nigeria;NEW;mexico;NEW;russia

Method 4

I can do it with more code but no loops!

Data

china;US;nigeria;mexico;russia
iindia;austria;japan;chile

Script

BEGIN{ FS=";" }{
    insert=$param
    ix=index($0, insert) + length(insert)

    if (NF <= $param) {
            rest = substr($0,ix,length($0))
            gsub(";",";NEW;",rest)
            line = substr($0,0,ix) rest

            gsub(";;",";",line)
            gsub(";$","",line)
            print line

} else {print}}

Example

 Microknoppix v # awk -f replaceNth.awk -v param=2 countries
 china;US;NEW;nigeria;NEW;mexico;NEW;russia
 iindia;austria;NEW;japan;NEW;chile

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