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From: | Ed Morton |
Subject: | [bug-gawk] FIELDWIDTHS extension request |
Date: | Thu, 18 May 2017 10:07:59 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.8.0 |
foo bar stuff bill johnny other stuff of some different lengthwhere it's easy to see the length of the first 2 fields but the length of the final field can't be determined based on any sample so we end up writing code like:
FIELDWIDTHS = "5 7 9999"and pick some arbitrary number that we hope will be big enough to hold whatever appears in that 3rd field. It would be clearer and more robust if we could instead write:
FIELDWIDTHS = "5 7 *" or similar.We've been having a discussion about the applicability of this at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.awk/uip6-Ll9Lj0 in case some more background is useful.
Regards, Ed.
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