Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!hsdndev!rice!uw-beaver!milton!djo7613@milton.u.washington.edu
From: djo7613@milton.u.washington.edu (Dick O'Connor)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Splitting by character count in perl?
Message-ID: <17806@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 6 Mar 91 07:23:13 GMT
Sender: djo7613@milton.u.washington.edu
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 25

In order to follow an ancient bitpath left over from the days of HASP and
card punch queues, I need to split a file of 150 character lines into a
file of lines 80 characters wide or less.  Back when our Cyber was active,
we did this with a simple Fortran program; now I've got Ultrix and even
perl (!) at my disposal, and this problem cries out for a filter, not a pgm.

Our old program copied the first 78 characters on a line to the output file
after prepending and appending the character 'A'.  Characters 79-150 were
written to line 2 of the output file with prepended and appended 'B'.  A
simple routine glued things back together at the other end.

Trouble is, I'm enough of a novice that I can't see the simple Unix way.
All of the utilities I've looked at would be a lot happier if I could
move entire lines or fields.  But this is a file of typical scientific
data; no tabs, blanks may or may not separate fields depending on the
width of the (right-justified) number in that field, and an overall
adherence to a pre-defined "format."

After searching the perl man page, I'm stuck.  I keep thinking split
can do what I need, but the examples don't make it clear.  I'd prefer a
perl solution to one using "other" utilities; any takers?  It's that or
I use f77, and we wouldn't want to do that, would we??  :)  Thanks!

"Moby" Dick O'Connor                         djo7613@u.washington.edu 
Washington Department of Fisheries           *I brake for salmonids*