What is on Your Mind?

Hi guys...

I have been doing some coding for ADE for the AMIGA 1200, a UNIX package that has the gcc suite, ksh88 as the shell and a large subset of transient and resident commands.

Well I got stuck on this:-
somesubstring=${somestring:x:y}

After some searching I was steered here to this:-

I would like to say thanks to Franklin52 for such a simple answer as the locked thread will not allow me to press the 'Thanks' button...

From the Google POV this site is 'always on the radar' when I am searching for odd stuff...

So thanks Franklin52...

Good to hear. Perhaps one of the nice things about unix.com is that with regards to shell scripting, there usually is mix of code suggestions: short, one-line versions that are particularly suited for use on the command line and more elaborate versions that are perhaps more suited for scripts. In the thread you mentioned the version by hergp is quite more efficient and fast and more suited for scripts, whereas I think franklin52's version would be the more practical and easy to read-and-remember version for the command line.

And sometimes there are short versions that are really well suited for either type of application...

This variable expansion is IIRC only valid in ksh93, not in ksh88. In ksh88 you can do the following, though:

Code:

x="abcde"

while [ -n "$x" ] ; do
     first="${x%${x#?}}"
     rest="${x#?}"

     print - "first: $first    rest: $rest"

     x="$rest"
done

It is quite easy to build a substring-function around this.

I hope this helps.

bakunin