Sounds like this guy has to write stuff to make an IBM mainframe or other hunk of old iron happy (been there, done that).

What you could try (with no guarantees of success ;-) ) is to set local $/ = 80;. This will read the file in chunks of 80 bytes (note that the docs say bytes, but beware that "byte" and "character" are sometimes used interchangeably). You could also try working with sysread, which has an option to read a specific number of bytes.

I'm sure somebody will (or has) come up with a way to do this in a single line with a regex, but my regex mojo is not in that realm.

emc

Information about American English usage here and here.

Any Northeastern US area jobs? I'm currently unemployed.

In reply to Re: 80 characters long by swampyankee
in thread 80 characters long by aixmike

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