Breaking long lines into (characters, newline, space) groups Post: 302316390

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Breaking long lines into (characters, newline, space) groups Post 302316390 by rowie718 on Friday 15th of May 2009 12:31:52 AM

05-15-2009

Registered User

Thank you so much for your help cfajohnson!

I put together your suggestions and tested them. Its almost there, but there were 2 problems. The first I fixed fairly easily. The 79th character is the newline in the orignal ldif, so I shouldve expressed it as wanting 78 characters. I deducted 1 from anywhere I saw 79 or 80 in your awk command and that seemed to do the trick. The second problem is trickier. Take a 240 character line as an example. When the awk command breaks it, and adds the space in the second chunk, it does not take into account that the last character of that second chunk should be at the same ending position as the first chunk. As it is currently written, all chunks after the first break align 1 character to the right because of the space.

Example:

Code:

123456789012345678901234567890.....(240 character long string repeating)

currently breaks into :
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678
 901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456
 789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234
 567890

but should actually end up more like this, so that every line has 78 characters, 
plus newline (including the space we've added):

123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678
 90123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345
 67890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012
 34567890

The script currently looks like this:

#!/bin/ksh

echo "where is the ldif file located that you would like to parse?"
read ldiffile

awk 'length > 78 { while ( length($0) > 78 ) {
    printf "%s\n ", substr($0,1,78)
    $0 = substr($0,79)
  }
  if (length) print
  next
}
{print}' $ldiffile > /out.txt

Thanks again for your help, I really appreciate it.

rowie718

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LEARN ABOUT PHP

iconv_substr

ICONV_SUBSTR(3) 							 1							   ICONV_SUBSTR(3)

iconv_substr - Cut out part of a string

SYNOPSIS

       string  iconv_substr  (string  $str, int  $offset, [int	$length = iconv_strlen($str, $charset)], [string  $charset = ini_get("iconv.inter-
       nal_encoding")])

DESCRIPTION

	Cuts a portion of $str specified by the $offset and $length parameters.

PARAMETERS

	      o $str
		- The original string.

	      o $offset
		- If $offset is non-negative, iconv_substr(3) cuts the portion out of $str beginning at $offset'th character, counting from  zero.
		If  $offset  is  negative, iconv_substr(3) cuts out the portion beginning at the position, $offset characters away from the end of
		$str.

	      o $length
		- If $length is given and is positive, the return value will contain at most $length characters of  the  portion  that	begins	at
		$offset  (depending  on  the length of $string).  If negative $length is passed, iconv_substr(3) cuts the portion out of $str from
		the $offset'th character up to the character that is $length characters away from the end of the string. In case $offset  is  also
		negative, the start position is calculated beforehand according to the rule explained above.

	      o $charset
		-  If  $charset parameter is omitted, $string are assumed to be encoded in iconv.internal_encoding.  Note that $offset and $length
		parameters are always deemed to represent offsets that are calculated on the basis of the character set  determined  by  $charset,
		whilst the counterpart substr(3) always takes these for byte offsets.

RETURN VALUES

	Returns the portion of $str specified by the $offset and $length parameters.

	If $str is shorter than $offset characters long, FALSE will be returned.

SEE ALSO

       substr(3), mb_substr(3), mb_strcut(3).

PHP Documentation Group 													   ICONV_SUBSTR(3)

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