Hello all,

I have a script which picks up a series of large numbers, each of which are actually amalgamations of a series of other numbers. Unfortunately there are no separator characters so I can't use awk -F. I am looking for a way of splitting them into variables according to their character position. For example:

123456789

I would like to split this into a number of variables according their character position in the value, for example:

var1=12
var2=345
var3=678
var4=9

Is there a simple way of splitting a value according to character position with sed or some other program for example?

Many thanks.

Hi, Did you try variable expansion in your shell?

number=123456789

echo ${number:0:2}
echo ${number:3:4}

Many thanks for the prompt response and advice.

I have tried this and get the following back:

number=123456789

echo ${number:0:2}

0403-011 The specified substitution is not valid for this co
mmand.

echo ${number:3:4}

0403-011 The specified substitution is not valid for this co
mmand.

This can be done using cut command.

Please try with this.

str="123456789"
echo $str > temp.txt
var1=`cut -c1-2 temp.txt`
var2=`cut -c3-5 temp.txt`
var3=`cut -c6-9 temp.txt`
echo $var1
echo $var2
echo $var3

Regards,
Siba

Excellent, that works perfectly, many thanks!