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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Replacing individual characters with a pattern. Post 302576305 by maouinin on Thursday 24th of November 2011 08:22:04 AM
Old 11-24-2011
Replacing individual characters with a pattern.

Given a paragraph of text which individual words have been prepended with an equals sign, I want to replace the individual characters in each of the marked words with blank spaces (two underscores and a space) for students to fill in -- a cloze passage that lets the students know how many letters are in each of the words they are required to fill.

As an example, something like:
Code:
Truth be told, this is the =closest
 I've =ever =gotten to a =college =graduation.

should give:
Code:
Truth be told, this is the __ __ __ __ __ __ __  
I've __ __ __ __     __ __ __ __ __ __  to a 
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __.

another variation I would like to be able to get is :
Code:
Truth be told, this is the c __ __ __ __ __ __  I've e __ __ __  
g__ __ __ __ __  to a g __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __.

I'm not quite sure how to go about this but I suspect awk will be the tool to use.
 

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wc(1)							      General Commands Manual							     wc(1)

NAME
wc - count words, lines, and bytes or characters in a file SYNOPSIS
[file]... DESCRIPTION
The command counts lines, words, and bytes or characters in the named files, or in the standard input if no file names are specified. It also keeps a total count for all named files. A word is a string of characters delimited by spaces, tabs, or newlines. Options recognizes the following options: Report the number of bytes in each input file. Report the number of newline characters in each input file. Report the number of characters in each input file. Report the number of words in each input file. The and options are mutually exclusive. Otherwise, the and or options can be used in any combination to specify that a subset of lines, words, and bytes or characters are to be reported. When any option is specified, reports only the information requested. If no option is specified, the default output is When a file is specified on the command line, its name is printed along with the counts. Standard Output By default, the standard output contains an entry for each input file in the form: newlines words bytes file If the option is specified, the number of characters replaces the bytes field in this format. If any option is specified, the fields for the unspecified options are omitted. If no file operand is specified, neither the file name nor the preceding blank character is written. If more than one file operand is specified, an additional line is written at the end of the output, of the same format as the other lines, except that the word (in the POSIX locale) is written instead of a file name and the total of each column is written as appropriate. Under UNIX Standard environment, a word is a string of characters delimited by spaces, tabs, newline, carriage-return, vertical tab, or form-feed. RETURN VALUE
exits with one of the following values: Successful completion. An error occurred. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
For information about the UNIX Standard environment, see standards(5). Environment Variables determines the range of graphics and space characters, and the interpretation of text as single- and/or multibyte characters. determines the language in which messages are displayed. If or is not specified in the environment or is null, they default to the value of If is not specified or is null, it defaults to (see lang(5)). If any internationalization variable contains an invalid setting, they all default to See environ(5). International Code Set Support Single- and multibyte character code sets are supported. with a newline character, the count will be off by one. WARNINGS
The command counts the number of newlines to determine the line count. If a text file has a final line that is not terminated with a new- line character, the count will be off by one. EXAMPLES
Print the number of words and characters in The following is printed when the above command is executed: where words is the number of words and chars is the number of characters in SEE ALSO
standards(5). STANDARDS CONFORMANCE
wc(1)
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