will change all consecutive strings of 2 or more numbers and insert a
decimal point before the last two numbers.

I assumed you wanted something more than:

sed -e 's/12345600/123456.00/g' infile > outfile

which changes 12345600 to 123456.00 everywhere that string appears
in the infile.

This replaces the zero after the first six characters with two spaces
on all lines where this occurs.

Vary the number of periods to vary the number of leading characters.
There are 6 periods in the above command.

See man sed.

Chuck Demas
Needham, Mass.

--
  Eat Healthy    |   _ _   | Nothing would be done at all,

  Die Anyway     |    v    | That no one could find fault with it.

(problem B) if you know the extract position of the string...
    GIVEN: (1) the position of 0s start at 40
           (2) number of zeros to be replaced = 2
    TRYTHIS:
        print substr($0, 1, 20) "  " substr($0, 1, length($0) - 22);

hope this help

Simon

The beauty of awk is that you can do arithmetic with "strings", thus:

$ awk 'BEGIN { printf("%.2f\n", "12345600" / 100); exit }'
123456.00
$ awk 'BEGIN { printf("%.2f\n", 12345600 / 100); exit }'
123456.00
$

Same-o, same-o!

--
Jim Monty

Tempe, Arizona USA

:> >  I want to take the following string - 12345600
:> >  and make it 123456.00.
:>
:> this procedure will convert any number string from xxxyy to xxx.yy
:>      xxxxyy to xxxx.yy
:> thekeylen = length($4);
:> svalue = substr($4, 1, thekeylen -2) "." substr($4, thekeylen -1, 2);
:> printf "%s", svalue;

: How do you convert the value 123 to 1.23? You divide by 100.
: Simple arithmetic.

: The beauty of awk is that you can do arithmetic with "strings", thus:

This can be very misleading, while it sometimes looks like you can,
if you want your code to be reliable, you really should investigate
how awk really does this.
The short version is that it does "magic" typing, whereby if you treat
it like a number, it will be a number, if like a string, it's a string.
"a"+10 = 10
"a"+"b" = 0
"10"+10 = 20
"10"+10 = 20

etc, etc

: $ awk 'BEGIN { printf("%.2f\n", "12345600" / 100); exit }'
: 123456.00
: $ awk 'BEGIN { printf("%.2f\n", 12345600 / 100); exit }'
: 123456.00
: $

: Same-o, same-o!

: --
: Jim Monty

: Tempe, Arizona USA

--
Ian Stirling.   Designing a linux PDA, see  http://www.mauve.demon.co.uk/
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