replace ever 80th character in a string with a quote

[jason]

running under HPUX.

Perl Newbie here.

I have a file with one record that can be very wide, possibly 5000+
bytes wide.

I need to replace every 80th byte in that record with a double quote.
I have the below script, with a failed attempt to replace x number of
spaces with the quote, but that solution will not work upon further
inspection of the data.

#!/usr/bin/perl
strict;
use warnings;
open RIN,"<x1" or die "ERROR!";
open ROUT,">x2" or die "ERROR!";
while (<RIN>) {
$_=~s/ / "/g;
print ROUT ($_);
}
print ROUT ("\"");
close (RIN);
close (ROUT);

Many thanks for any help or information.

 

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

I have a file with one record that can be very wide, possibly 5000+
bytes wide.

I need to replace every 80th byte in that record with a double
quote.

s/(.{79})./$1"/g;

 

[Scott W Gifford]

running under HPUX.

Perl Newbie here.

I have a file with one record that can be very wide, possibly 5000+
bytes wide.

I need to replace every 80th byte in that record with a double quote.

Something like this is one way to do the substitution without a regexp:

use constant WIDTH => 80;
my $s = "0123456789" x 100;

foreach my $i (1..length($s)/WIDTH)
{
substr($s,$i*WIDTH-1,1)=q{'};
}

print $s,"\n";

----ScottG.