I group those parts I want to keep unchanged inside escaped brackets \( and \). I wrote every character as dot. I could have written four characters as \{4\} for example but it's not worth compared to type 4 dots.
I made 4 groups that stay unchanged and so are just printed. Between them I inserted the characters you wanted. This is still position related but you have to type a number of dots or sum them up with \{6\} for 6 dots for example.
Thanks! I was getting the sense I might need to do a sort of patchwork using SED or PERL (neither of which I have ever used, but between your suggestion and a cheat sheet, it ought to be doable).
However, each of my "lines" is actually a DNA sequence several hundred characters long. (As opposed to the short version used in the example--I should have mentioned that up-front, I suppose.)
Will it work to stick 40 of those long lines in the command? Or can I use the command to do the process to "each line in the file"? Or will having ~550 character lines be a problem, regardless?
I have a sort of offer from the spouse to write something in FORTRAN sooner or later if SED, AWK etc can't handle the task, but I'm hoping I can make this work myself, and from what I can remember, this should be possible.
awk and sed will work every line of your given input file even if it's several thousands or more; you can just try it out.
You can write a very long line that has all your needed changes in it for every position. It is just more work for you but awk or sed would not mind I think. Have to try it out.
If you want to get deeper there is a really good book about awk and sed if your interessted on using them: sed & awk | O'Reilly Media
I also tried a version without the initial ">" symbol, in case that had an inappropriate meaning.
here are three main versions of the sed script I'm trying to run, along with variants. I'm using the g command rather than the individual replacements because the replacement value will always be the same. Two of the versions are an attempt to figure out what sort of brackets to use when using numbers rather than dots. The final, clunky version uses the dots.
version 1
Code:
$> sed 's/\{36\}.\{12\}.\{9\}.\(.\).\(..\).\{12\}.\(.\).\(.*\)/x/g' infile1
version 1a
Code:
$> sed -e 's/\{36\}.\{12\}.\{9\}.\(.\).\(..\).\{12\}.\(.\).\(.*\)/x/g' infile1
version 1b
Code:
$> sed 's/\{36\}.\{12\}.\{9\}.\(.\).\(..\).\{12\}.\(.\).\(.*\)/x/g' infile >zzzzzzzzzzzzzGGGAAGTGAGGCGYTGTTGTTATTTGGTTTAYGAGTCAGAGGTGTTTTTTCACGGAGAGATGGCTCTAAGA
>zzzzzzzzzzzzzGGGAAGTGAGGCGYTGTTGTTATTTGGTTTAYGAGYTAGAGGYGTCTTTTTACGGAGAGACGGTTTTAAGA
version 2
Code:
$> sed 's/\(36\).\(12\).\(9\).\(.\).\(..\).\(12\).\(.\).\(.*\)/x/g' infile1
(same variants as with version 1)
version 3
Code:
$> sed 's/\(....................................\).\(............\).\(.........\).\(.\).\(..\).\(............\).\(.\).(.*\)/x/g'
(same variants as with version 1)
the resulting error is sometimes along the lines of command not found, other times the error says unbalanced parentheses.
to give you a sense of the magnitude of the real program, here's the proposed script for the entire piece of DNA (which would be applied to about 60 lines of that length, rather than the two lines in the infile example.
Code:
$> sed 's/\(36\).\(12\).\(9\).\(.\).\(..\).\(12\).\(.\).\(13\).\(6\).....\(5\).\(.\)..\(7\).....\(.\).\(6\).\(..\).\(6\).\(...\)...\(25\).\(18\).\(..\)..\(8\).\(...\).\(...\).\(...\).\(5\).\(6\).\(9\).\(10\)..\(21\).\(6\)..\(8\).\(10\).\(4\).\(10\).\(24\).\(26\).\(.*\)/x/g' infile
I'm using a MacOS X default (Bash shell) terminal.
Is there anything I am doing right?
Is there something dead obvious that I'm doing wrong?
I need to write, oh, 18 scripts of this length, and get them working.
---------- Post updated at 03:16 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:14 PM ----------
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