extraction of info from fixed position

[Rose]

Instead of specifying in detail (e.g. d+d+...) in a regular expression, is
it possible to specify some fixed numbers for perl to extract information,
in this example, S, 95 from line 1; 'space',42 from line2 and 'T',156 from
line3 in the following 3 lines?

46 51 V S S- 0 0 95 -2,-0.9 -7,-0.2 -6,-0.2
2,-0.1 -0.899 75.7-167.1-103.3 112.1 10.3 5.4 11.8
47 52 E > - 0 0 42 -9,-2.9 3,-1.9 -2,-0.6
2,-0.2 -0.404 37.9 -78.0 -91.0 165.9 6.6 5.6 11.1
48 53 K T 3 S+ 0 0 156 1,-0.3 -1,-0.1
2,-0.2 -10,-0.0 -0.457 122.1 14.4 -66.2 127.7 4.9 5.9 7.7

 

[Ben Morrow]

Instead of specifying in detail (e.g. d+d+...) in a regular expression, is
it possible to specify some fixed numbers for perl to extract information,
in this example, S, 95 from line 1; 'space',42 from line2 and 'T',156 from
line3 in the following 3 lines?

46 51 V S S- 0 0 95 -2,-0.9 -7,-0.2 -6,-0.2
2,-0.1 -0.899 75.7-167.1-103.3 112.1 10.3 5.4 11.8

If I've understood you correctly, that's what substr is for.

Ben

 

[Rose]

If I've understood you correctly, that's what substr is for.

Ben

Yes, Ben. You're right. Thanks. Now I have to think about how to solve the
problem of recognizing space in the first element (so it remains a space)
and removing spaces in the 2nd element (so the latter one will be a number
but not a string).

 

[Ben Morrow]

Yes, Ben. You're right. Thanks. Now I have to think about how to solve the
problem of recognizing space in the first element (so it remains a space)
and removing spaces in the 2nd element (so the latter one will be a number
but not a string).

Don't worry about it. Perl will strip leading and trailing spaces when
auto-converting a string to a number:

~% perl -wle'print " -100.45 " + 1'
-99.45

Ben