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Full Discussion: need to read 3° character from a text file
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers need to read 3° character from a text file Post 79072 by Unbeliever on Monday 25th of July 2005 09:34:15 AM
Old 07-25-2005
sed and awk wont work if the character you've got isn't on the first line of the file.

If you have GNU text utiliities installed you can do it using the versions tail and head in the distribution.

head -c 4 yourfile.txt | tail -c 1

If you wanted the 4th charcter for example. However this counts carriage returns and spaces as characters. If you want to ignore spaces and/or carraige returns you can do it but its a little more complicated.

It would be easy if you have access to perl:

cat youfile.txt | perl -e 'read(STDIN,$data,4); print substr($data,-1);'

again gives your the 4th character.

Sean
 

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LEARN ABOUT OSF1

dxmcstextreplace

DXmCSTextReplace(3X)													      DXmCSTextReplace(3X)

NAME

       DXmCSTextReplace - Replaces a specified segment of text in a compound string text widget.

SYNOPSIS

       DXmCSTextStatus DXmCSTextReplace(
	       Widget widget,
	       int from_pos,
	       int to_pos,
	       XmString value );

PARAMETERS

       The  identifier	(widget ID) of the compound string text widget.  An integer that represents the first character position of the text being
       replaced.  An integer that represents the last character position of the text being replaced.  Replacement text for  part  of  the  current
       text in the compound string text widget, or additional text to be inserted into the compound string text widget.

DESCRIPTION

       The  DXmCSTextReplace  routine  replaces  part  of  the text in the compound string text widget.  Within the widget, positions are numbered
       starting at 0 and increasing sequentially.  For example, to replace the second and third characters in the text, from_pos should be  1  and
       to_pos should be 3.  To insert text after the fourth character, from_pos and to_pos should both be 4.

RETURN VALUES

       A value that represents the status (success or failure) of the replace operation, as follows:

       --------------------------------------------------------
       Value			  Description
       --------------------------------------------------------
       DXmCSTextStatusEditDone	  Text replaced successfully.
       DXmCSTextStatusEditError   Text not replaced (failure).
       --------------------------------------------------------

SEE ALSO

       DXmCreateCSText(3X), DXmCSTextSetString(3X), DXmCSTextGetString(3X)

															      DXmCSTextReplace(3X)
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