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Bad substitution error while working with substring

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# 1  
Old 06-25-2013
Bad substitution error while working with substring
Hi I'm using ksh.
And i'm trying to get the substring like below.
but giving the following error
Code:
 
#!/bin/ksh
foo=teststring
bar=${foo:0:5}
echo $bar

And the error is
Code:
./sbstr_test.sh[4]: bar=${foo:0:5}: bad substitution

what is wrong in this script. Please correct me

---------- Post updated at 06:11 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:21 PM ----------

Even i tried with the following but of no use

Code:
#!/bin/ksh
foo=teststring
bar=${$foo:0:5}
echo $bar

and getting the error same as above
Last edited by smile689; 06-25-2013 at 09:09 AM.. Reason: Added
# 2  
Old 06-25-2013
What are you trying to do here???
# 3  
Old 06-25-2013
Why not simply bar="$foo:0:5"?
# 4  
Old 06-25-2013
Most probably you're using ksh88 (or pdksh), but the syntax above is available in ksh93.
Note that zsh and bash support the ${varname:n:m} notation too.

Edit: I suppose the OP wants to extract a substring from the value of the variable:

Code:
% foo=teststring
% printf '%s\n' "${foo:0:5}"
tests

Note that in this case you can use also:

Code:
% printf '%.5s\n' "$foo"
tests

or:

Code:
% printf '%s\n' "${foo%${foo#?????}}"
tests

Last edited by radoulov; 06-25-2013 at 09:58 AM..
This User Gave Thanks to radoulov For This Post:
smile689
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