CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashshellubuntu
Rushikesh Garadade
Rushikesh Garadade

Reputation: 627

Printing 3 character of each line in a file in bash shell

I was solving one problem from one site, question is as follows:

"Given N lines of input in a file, print the 3rd character from each line as a new line of output. It is guaranteed that each of the n lines of input will have a 3rd character."

So to solve the problem I have written a command

while read -r line
do 
      echo ${line:2:1}
done < sample.txt

Content in "sample.txt" is : 

C.B - Cantonment Board/Cantonment
C.M.C – City Municipal Council
C.T – Census Town
E.O – Estate Office
G.P - Gram Panchayat
I.N.A – Industrial Notified Area
I.T.S - Industrial Township
M – Municipality
M.B – Municipal Board
M.C – Municipal Committee

I am getting output as follows:

B
M
T
O
P
N
T
â
B
C

According to the site, the answer should be:

B
M
T
O
P
N
T
в
B
C

Please not that 3rd last output is "в" and I am getting "â" I am new to the ascii, uts-8 conversion so not aware if this has any relation .

What should be change in the code to bring this answer?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 4484

Answers (2)

P....
P....

Reputation: 18381

something with awk: Columns are changed to characters using FS="" 

awk -vFS="" '{print $3}' file

Upvotes: 2

Mureinik
Mureinik

Reputation: 311428

This can be done with a straightforward cut call:

$ cut -c3 sample.txt

Upvotes: 4

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