I need to parse a string in a shell script. I understand there is some in built function to use that. can someone explain the syntax ?

Say, it is like this
#!/bin/ksh
read input
# input is entered as 'welcome'
#Now I want to extract say only first 4 characters or last four #characters.

Thanks
Asutosh

You can use awk for both.

e.g.
First four characters
Last four characters
Cheers
ZB

Zazzybob, Thanks for your reply. It would be great if you please explain me the arguments of substr function. I could not find in man pages.
Regds
asutoshch

Sure

substr( s, i, n )

Where:

s is the string you want to perform the substr operation on
i is the first character that you want to extract
n is the last character you want to match

So if you said substr( "hello", 2, 4 ) it would match the second, third and fourth character and return "ell".

Let me explain the code I gave

In the above example, the first argument to substr is $0 (which in this case is the text piped to it - "$0" is the entire record). The second argument is 0 (I could also have used 1) because I want to match from the start of the string. I want to grab the first four characters, so the third argument is 4.

The above code also makes use length(string) command to return the number of characters in the string.
So here, I'm saying "return the substring from the first character (which is the length of the string minus 3), up until the very end of the string".

To clarify this:
So in our substr, we grab from character 4 to character 7 inclusive, which are chars 4,5,6,7 - the last 4 chars.

Excellent. I sincerely thank you for the clear explanation.
Regds
Asutoshch

No problem

I also missed a very simple solution too - you can use head and tail with the -c option

e.g. (on Linux)
echo "welcome" | head -c 4
echo "welcome" | tail -c 5

On HP-UX, you must use head -c -n 4

There's more than one way to do it with *nix!

Cheers
ZB

It's worth mentioning that expr has a substr function too...

$ input="welcome"
$ expr substr $input 1 4
welc
$ expr substr $input $((${#input}-3)) 4
come