UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi you,

I have the following problem:

I have a string like the followings: '166Mhz' or '128MB' or '300sec' or ...
What I want to do is, I want to split the strings in a part with the numbers and a part with letters.
Since the strings are not allway three digits and than text i couldn't do this with a simple cut.

How to solve this. I suggest there should be an easy way to do this with awk or so, but I am just to stupid to do this.

Thanks for any help.

Ben Sky

Perderabo just posted a solution to a problem very similar to this...

To get the beginning part (with the numbers) use:

a="166Mhz"; echo ${a%%[A-Za-z]*}

To get the ending part (with the letters) use:

a="166Mhz"; echo ${a##*[0-9]}

Code:

if (/(\d+)(\w+)/) { print "Digits: $1\tLetters:$2\n" };

thats what you would use in perl.

Thanks alot, You are the best, I didn't know this trick, but it works great!