Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!csli!gandalf
From: gandalf@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Juergen Wagner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Picking a character from a word
Message-ID: <3601@csli.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 23 Apr 88 02:47:36 GMT
References: <578@amethyst.ma.arizona.edu>
Reply-To: gandalf@stanford (Juergen Wagner)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 14

How about
	sed 's/^...\(.\).*/\1/'
which extracts the fourth character of a string read from stdin.

More general (and more ugly):
	awk '{print substr($0,4,1);}'
which allows you to pick an arbitrary substring from the lines on stdin.

If you are using this very often, I suggest to write a small C program
doing the job (string manipulation). Awk and sed are not very fast.

-- 
Juergen "Gandalf" Wagner,		   gandalf@csli.stanford.edu
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford CA