I have a string which is something like this..

abcd efghijkl

when I use this using substring() function 2 spaces are bein considered as one starngely.

Is there any thing I am doing wroing

the input file maintest has the string specified and the code is below


while read lines
do
echo $lines | awk '{print substr($0,4,3)}'

done < maintest

the output is
d e

where as it should be 'd ' d followed by 2 blank spaces.

Please suggest
thanks