Question

I have lines like the ones shown below.

abcbasndo
bacmaisca
ascmasoc

Now, I need to take out the first three characters of every line and add AAA at the start and end of each line, so that it looks like the one shown below.

AAAabcAAA
AAAbacAAA
AAAascAAA

I am using windows.

Please help.

Answer 1

This little cmd script will do the job for you:

@setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
@echo off
for /f "delims=" %%a in (qq.txt) do (
    set var=%%a
    echo AAA!var:~0,3!AAA
)
endlocal

See the following transcript:

C:\Pax> type qq.txt
abcbasndo
bacmaisca
ascmasoc

C:\Pax> qq
AAAabcAAA
AAAbacAAA
AAAascAAA

The for loop grabs each line in the qq.txt file (without delims=, it would use spaces within the line as delimiters) and puts it in %%a.

The body of the for loop puts that value into var and then uses the substring operator to get the first three characters.

I haven’t tested what will happen if the line has less than three characters since (1) you didn’t specify what you expected; and (2) it should be fairly easy to expand this script to handle it.