Re: Text Manipulation

[Spearing Tyler Contractor USTC <Tyler.Spearing@hq.transcom.mil>]

Thanks for the assistance so far, it is helping some.

Let me expand a little on the requirements.  In this

particular instance, the first field will be, say,

18 characters long, followed by a space, then three fields,

say 8 characters long each followed by a space, and then a final field,

say 5 characters long.  A colleage of mine is attempting

to evangelize me with the shell commands "cut" and "paste".

I'm a little concerned with cutting out all the data into

separate files, and then pasting it all back together

into one file.  It seems too easy to offset the lines

somehow, or otherwise screw up the whole thing.

 

I'm kind of thinking of a PERL script that will take

the characters one at a time, and looping the appropriate

number of times for each field of characters, and inserting

the spaces between loops.

 

We have run across this problem before, but fortunately have

been able to brute force our way through it; or even more

fortunately, have been able to substitute because of repeated

characters.  It just seems like this would be a fairly common

problem with a published solution, but we have not yet been

able to find it.

 

Thanks again,

 

Tyler

 

 

 

 

 

 

All,

 

I have racked my brains trying to figure out a way to insert

a column of white space in a plain text file several (tens of)

thousands lines long.  The problem is there is no common text

before or after the column I need to insert the blank space.

 

For example, take the following block of text:

 

12345ABCDE67890FGHJK

Q1W2E3R4T5Y6U7I8O9P0

MNBHGVFRT7352508HY7S

THISLINEHASNOBLANKS2

ANOTHERLINEWITHNONE5

1MORELINEWITHNONEZZZ

 

I would like to insert a column (or two) of white space to

essentially create fields to be manipulated with NAWK, so

that the above text would look like the following:

 

12345AB CDE67890F GHJK

Q1W2E3R 4T5Y6U7I8 O9P0

MNBHGVF RT7352508 HY7S

THISLIN EHASNOBLA NKS2

ANOTHER LINEWITHN ONE5

1MORELI NEWITHNON EZZZ

 

I can use PERL, if necessary, but have a preference for either a shell script or SED command, etc..

 

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Tyler