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From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Splitting by character count in perl?
Message-ID: <1991Mar6.203859.17332@iwarp.intel.com>
Date: 6 Mar 91 20:38:59 GMT
References: <17806@milton.u.washington.edu>
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Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz)
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Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Lines: 23
In-Reply-To: djo7613@milton.u.washington.edu (Dick O'Connor)

In article <17806@milton.u.washington.edu>, djo7613@milton (Dick O'Connor) writes:
| 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.

To split'em:

perl -pe 'chop; ($a,$b) = unpack("a78a*",$_); $_ = "A${a}A\nB${b}B\n";'

To join'em: (presuming alternating lines of A's and B's from above):

perl -pe 's/^A(.*)A\n$/$1/ || s/^B(.*)B\n$/$1\n/;'

If you can have an A line without a B line, you will need to maintain
state between lines.  That's an exercise for you.

print "Just another Perl hacker,"
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
\=Cute Quote: "Intel: putting the 'backward' in 'backward compatible'..."====/