Question

KSH
HP-SOL-Lin
Cannot use xAWK

I have several strings that are quite long and i want to break them down into smaller substrings.

What I have

String = "word1 word2 word3 word4 .....wordx"

What I want

String1="word1 word2"
String2="word3 word4"
String3="word4 word5"
Stringx="wordx wordx+1"
etc.....

How Can i break this up to where if my string is longer than x words, break into smaller strings no longer than x? I have no idea how long each string will be. We can test for it, but it will not be consistent.

StrLen=`echo $string |wc -w`

Some strings are longer than 2000 words, so i cannot use a shell array as there is a max of 1024 fields.

ideas?

Here is what I have come up with based on comments below

FIELDS=`echo $String | wc -w`
((n=$FIELDS/2+1))
i=1

while [[ $i -le $n ]]; do
typeset STRING$i=`echo $String | cut -d" " -f$CUTSTART-$CUTEND`
do stuff

i=`expr $i+1`
CUTSTART=`expr $CUTSTART+1`
CUTEND=`expr $CUTEND+1`
done

Still seem to be having issues with the typeset peice.
Assumptions

i=1
CUTSTART=1
CUTEND=2
String=one two three

myserver> typeset STRING=`echo $String | cut -d" " -f$CUTSTART-$CUTEND`
myserver> echo $STRING
myserver> one two
myserver>
myserver> typeset STRING$i=`echo $String | cut -d" " -f$CUTSTART-$CUTEND`
myserver> echo $STRING1
myserver> one

what is this issue with $i messing up my echo|cut command?

Answer 1

Here’s a loop that uses read to extract two words at a time:

# Take advantage of the fact that ksh doesn't execute
# read in a subshell.
i=1
String="one two three four five six seven eight"
while echo $String | read w1 w2 w3; do
    typeset "String$i=$w1 $w2"
    if [ -z $w3 ]; then
        break;
    fi
    String=$w3
    let i=i+1
done
echo $String1
echo $String2
echo $String3
# etc.