Subj : Re: Strip characters and lines from a text file
To   : All
From : Jonathan de Boyne Pollard
Date : Tue Feb 05 2002 09:13 pm

From: Jonathan.de.Boyne.Pollard@f3.n342.z1.cereal.mv.com (Jonathan de Boyne 
Pollard)
Subject: Re: Strip characters and lines from a text file

From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard@tesco.net>

MN> Is it possible to strip the first few characters from a
MN> line in a text file.

Yes.  It is impossible to do robustly in the COMMAND and CMD scripting
languages, because one cannot guard against text files that contain the
'<', '>', '|', and '&' metacharacters.  One can be more robust in the
4OS2/TCOS2/4NT/TCWIN32/4DOS scripting languages, as one can use the built in
SETDOS command to turn off metacharacter recognition.  However, this still
makes for largely illegible scripts.

On the other hand it is trivially easy to do robustly in REXX, which is an
excellent scripting language for text and string processing tasks of this kind.
 Here is a robust REXX script that can be used as a filter. Supply the text
file to be stripped as standard input, and the number of initial lines to skip
and the number of characters to strip as arguments.  Direct standard output
(and add /? message and argument validation) according to taste.

        /*REXX*/
        parse arg LinesToSkip CharactersToStrip .

        CurrentLine = 0
        do while lines() > 0
                line = linein()
                CurrentLine = CurrentLine + 1
                if CurrentLine > LinesToSkip then
                        call lineout, substr(line, CharactersToStrip + 1)
        end
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