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From: Chris Townley <news@cct-net.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Text processing on VMS
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2024 16:20:20 +0100
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On 13/10/2024 16:04, David Meyer wrote:
> I've got a text file with data that I want to select lines matching
> certain character strings, then extract string values from the selected
> lines by character position. On Unix, I would use awk or Perl. Does VMS
> have a similar tool, should I use my favorite programming language and
> call the STR$ RTL, can I write a TPU script to do this, or should I
> transfer the file to a Unix box and user awk or Perl? ;)
> 

I have often done this in this manner:

Search file for matching records to second file.
Read through in a DCL loop, and use f$locate to find the string, then 
f$extract to extract what I want, then write to a third file.

-- 
Chris