I was asked today to remove the first 6 characters from every line in a document. It was known that each line contained at least 6 characters. For me, that means a find a replace. Here is how I did it (in a number of different ways). Can you think of any other ways to do it?
cut -c7-
rr ^.{6}
colrm 1 6
rr s/^.{6}//
sed 's/^.\{6\}//'
perl -pe 's/^.{6}//'
ruby -pe 'sub /^.{6}/,""'
gawk 'BEGIN{FIELDWIDTHS="6 999"}{print$2}'
I was pretty happy with rr taking the prize for least characters. I do want to point out that since rr defaults to multi-line and global replacements the “^” is required. If you wanted to remove the “^” (like you could with sed, perl, and ruby) then you would have to use the “–line” or “-l” and “–notglobal” or “-ng” options. So a single character replaces 7! If you want to grab rr just do:
$ sudo gem install regex_replace
Also, here is a link to gawk – GNU’s awk. This has the very nice FIELDWIDTHS variable, which is extremely useful!
Also keep in mind that the regular expressions above ^.{6} only work because the lines were known to have at least 6 characters. If we didn’t know that we would have had to use something like ^.{0,6} to allow up to 6 characters (and even that could be ^.{1.6} ignoring blank lines which can’t change). So again the requirements for this challenge were important.
Update!
I came across a neat little unix utility I didn’t know about called “cut”. As you can see, the new command tops the list quite handily too. “cut -c 7-” is actually cutting from each line the 7th character onwards (counting starts from 1). In this case once it spits what it cuts out to stdout; so it leaves behind those first 6 characters and therefore accomplishes our goal. In the above list I removed the optional space after “-c” to make it just a tad shorter. Pretty neat.
Then I found “colrm” which is the most straightforward. This one wins in simplicity. No hacks, just straightforward does exactly what you think it does. Very cool.
Double Update!
I figured since quite a bit of my rr usage has an empty string for the second argument, I figured it would be okay to throw that in as the default case. So now there is a third usage for rr, which is great for pipes, that just strips something out. That brings rr back up to a tie for first place. Very cool.
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