Parsing a line by bytes or characters

[lresides]

Hi,
I have a file which was supplied by an outside vendor. The file contains no end-of-line type characters. When it is viewed via emacs for instance, it is one big (very big) line.

I know that a logical record exists every 250 characters. I would like to insert a carriage return or end-of-line character every 250 characters so that I have one logical record per line.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I've been searching various links for a while but haven't run across anything similar. Thanks, Leigh

 

[justice41]

The [tt]read[/tt] function will let you specify a number of bytes to read from a filehandle. So the following

while ( read(FILE, $buf, $bytes) ) {

    print "$buf\n";
}

will read [tt]$bytes[/tt] number of bytes from the FILE filehandle into $buf at a time and print with a trailing newline.

jaa

 

[lresides]

Thank-you!! I love it when this stuff works! I'm just dabble right now in perl, but it is fun when I'm not pulling out my hair. Thanks again, Leigh