Re: OT: a problem about text manipulation

[Paul Smith]

On 10/31/06, David Fletcher  wrote:
> > I have a text file with more than 300000 of lines like the following:
> >
> > 1       E       E       E
> > 2       C       D
> > 3       B       E       D
> > 4       C       E       D
> > 5               D       E
> >
> > I am looking for an automatic way of transforming my text file into
> > another one with the format
> >
> > 1       E
> > 1       E
> > 1       E
> > 2       C
> > 2       C
> > 3       B
> > 3       B
> > 3       D
> > 4       C
> > 4       C
> > 4       D
> > 5       E
> >
> > Any ideas?
>
> I am guessing that the transformation should have been
> 1 E
> 1 E
> 1 E
> 2 C
> 2 D
> 3 B
> 3 E
> 3 D
> 4 C
> 4 E
> 4 D
> 5 D
> 5 E
> ????
>
> I'm not that great at scripting which somebody else will no doubt
> suggest, so personally I'd write a little C/C++ application to do it.
> I've got a string parsing function that I wrote to split a string
> into white space delimited fields and return a count of the number of
> fields, which would be a good starting point for this.

Correct guess, Dave.

Is there something easier than C/C++? Since I am not a programmer, I
would like to use a tool very easy of learning.

Paul