Shell Programming and Scripting

Code:

$ echo "breakAfterThreeChars:" | perl -ne  's/(\w{3,3})/\1\n/g;print'
bre
akA
fte
rTh
ree
Cha
rs:

For me, this i/p: 123456789 is one record, and two fields.

Hi.

Code:

$ echo 123456789 | fold -w 3
123
456
789

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

HemaV,
Check this out.. using awk:

Code:

$ awk '{a=length($0);for(i=1;i<=a;i=i+3) print substr($0,i,3)}' file
123
456
789

Enjoy..

I believe that the point he was trying to make (and what everyone else seems to have assumed) is that i/p: and o/p: are not part of the actual data, but only labels in the forum post's text to refer to the input data and the output data.

Regards,
Alister

Aha, I did not think of that.

When the original post does not specify a platform, it would be thoughtful to avoid using proprietary extensions that provide zero benefit and have a portable counterpart.

Aside from the potentially problematic \n, the explicit capture and backreference aren't needed.

Code:

sed 's/.../&\
/g'

Note that both variations of this approach will insert additional blank lines after each line that is a multiple of 3 characters long.

In my opinion, however, anything other than fold is just an academic exercise.

Regards,
Alister