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Full Discussion: Checking for certain characters
Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Checking for certain characters Post 302215747 by SAMZ on Thursday 17th of July 2008 06:22:01 AM
Old 07-17-2008
Checking for certain characters
Could anyone help with the following enquiry.. i have a file in the following format:

ID .... VALUE
A001 .... 100
B002 .... 200
A004 .... 300
B006 .... 100
A997 .... 200
B776 .... 400

It is in a column format, but I want to check that the ID field always begins with with and A or B character this is my logic thus far:


If Character 1 DOES NOT equal A or B
then
display error message
else
carry on doing what you want
fi

not really sure how to chech that character 1 of each line does not equal A or B
habe tried following with no no joi

If [ ! grep '^A' $file || ! grep '^B' $file ] then
print "error"
else
print "it works"
fi

but the above does not work i believe it to logic as my unix understanding not great, please assist.
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

wcscspn

WCSCSPN(3)						     Linux Programmer's Manual							WCSCSPN(3)

NAME

       wcscspn - search a wide-character string for any of a set of wide characters

SYNOPSIS

       #include <wchar.h>

       size_t wcscspn(const wchar_t *wcs, const wchar_t *reject);

DESCRIPTION

       The  wcscspn()  function is the wide-character equivalent of the strcspn(3) function.  It determines the length of the longest initial seg-
       ment of wcs which consists entirely of wide-characters not listed in reject.  In other words, it searches for the first occurrence  in  the
       wide-character string wcs of any of the characters in the wide-character string reject.

RETURN VALUE

       The  wcscspn() function returns the number of wide characters in the longest initial segment of wcs which consists entirely of wide-charac-
       ters not listed in reject.  In other words, it returns the position of the first occurrence in the wide-character string wcs of any of  the
       characters in the wide-character string reject, or wcslen(wcs) if there is none.

CONFORMING TO

       C99.

SEE ALSO

       strcspn(3), wcspbrk(3), wcsspn(3)

COLOPHON

       This  page is part of release 3.44 of the Linux man-pages project.  A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
       be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

GNU
								    1999-07-25								WCSCSPN(3)
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