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

Your code works if there is more than one space. Maybe the problem is that you're testing with echo and if you do echo word1<space><space>word2 the output will be "word1<space>word2". If you want echo to output more than one space use ", echo "word1<space><space>word2".

perfect !!

just replaced

echo $line with echo "$line" | awk '{print substr($0,4,3)}'


Thanks a lot..

No problem. That happened because despite how many spaces you type, the number of arguments is the same and echo only cares about arguments (which are then separated by a single space).

Those are two arguments "one" and "two".
That is one argument "one two".

Glad I could help.