OT: a problem about text manipulation

[David Fletcher]

At 10:25 31/10/2006, you wrote:

>Dear All
>
>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?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Paul
>
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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.

Dave F