Saved Bookmarks
| 1. |
Solve : Batch File To Extract String Of Characters From Txt-File? |
|
Answer» Hi, There already are utilities that will truncate a file after a definite number of characters. The questions seems to say: take 5000 characters from a random place in a file, remove it and put it in another file. He's not trying to truncate files as I understand it. Quote from: Stefan on May 05, 2015, 09:42:22 PM Does that make sense? Can anyone help me with this?
yes that's what I'm trying to do, foxidrive. So the general idea is that I have a bunch of texts and want to run tests on even-sized chunks of those to see if I can identify the author. (I would do strings of 4000, 3000, 2000, 1000 and 500 next). So the texts I have do not have line-breaks in them... but I'm not entirely sure how that would be different from "carriage return and linefeed characters" (I'm really new to this--sorry). Thanks! OK, now it is clear. Some texts have both the CR and the LF controls. Others have just one of the two. But now that we see what you want, the CR LF is not important. However, a CR might be used to end a paragraph. Foxdrive might help do this in batch. Myself, I would have to use Q Basic, an old MS program. Thanks! Anything would be fine with me. This will help me write a paper--and should it get published, I'll thank you two in it! What about white space? Is thi some kind of word frequency or vocabulary profile analysis? I have read posts by David Graves who has analysed works by JANE Austen, but I don't know what his software is like (he wrote some himself). You can get lots of books in text format at Project Gutenberg, and you could load one into a good editor which has word and character count (e.g. MS Word) and select blocks of the right length. Here are 5000 characters (not counting spaces) from "The Sleeper Wakes" by HG Wells. I would be inclined to use a more capable language than batch (Visual Basic Script for example) CHAPTER II. THE TRANCE The state of cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted for an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it was his eyes could be closed. He was removed from the hotel to the Boscastle surgery, and from the surgery, after some weeks, to London. But he still resisted every attempt at reanimation. After a time, for reasons that will appear later, these attempts were discontinued. For a great space he lay in that STRANGE condition, inert and still neither dead nor living but, as it were, suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence. His was a darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a dreamless inanition, a vast space of peace. The tumult of his mind had swelled and risen to an abrupt climax of silence. Where was the man? Where is any man when insensibility takes hold of him? "It seems only yesterday," said Isbister. "I remember it all as though it happened yesterday--clearer perhaps, than if it had happened yesterday." It was the Isbister of the last chapter, but he was no longer a young man. The hair that had been brown and a trifle in excess of the fashionable length, was iron grey and clipped close, and the face that had been pink and white was buff and ruddy. He had a pointed beard shot with grey. He talked to an elderly man who wore a summer suit of drill (the summer of that year was unusually hot). This was Warming, a London solicitor and next of kin to Graham, the man who had fallen into the trance. And the two men stood side by side in a room in a house in London regarding his recumbent figure. It was a yellow figure lying lax upon a water-bed and clad in a flowing shirt, a figure with a shrunken face and a stubby beard, lean limbs and lank nails, and about it was a case of thin glass. This glass seemed to mark off the sleeper from the reality of life about him, he was a thing apart, a strange, isolated abnormality. The two men stood close to the glass, peering in. "The thing gave me a shock," said Isbister "I feel a queer sort of surprise even now when I think of his white eyes. They were white, you know, rolled up. Coming here again brings it all back to me. "Have you never seen him since that time?" asked Warming. "Often wanted to come," said Isbister; "but business nowadays is too serious a thing for much holiday keeping. I've been in America most of the time." "If I remember rightly," said Warming, "you were an artist?" "Was. And then I became a married man. I saw it was all up with black and white, very soon--at least for a mediocre man, and I jumped on to process. Those posters on the Cliffs at Dover are by my people." "Good posters," admitted the solicitor, "though I was sorry to see them there." "Last as long as the cliffs, if necessary," exclaimed Isbister with satisfaction. "The world changes. When he fell asleep, twenty years ago, I was down at Boscastle with a box of water-colours and a noble, old-fashioned ambition. I didn't expect that some day my pigments would glorify the whole blessed coast of England, from Land's End round again to the Lizard. Luck comes to a man very often when he's not looking." Warming seemed to doubt the quality of the luck. "I just missed seeing you, if I recollect aright." "You came back by the trap that took me to Camelford railway station. It was close on the Jubilee, Victoria's Jubilee, because I remember the seats and flags in Westminster, and the row with the cabman at Chelsea." "The Diamond Jubilee, it was," said Warming; "the second one." "Ah, yes! At the proper Jubilee--the Fifty Year affair--I was down at Wookey--a boy. I missed all that.... What a fuss we had with him! My landlady wouldn't take him in, wouldn't let him stay--he looked so queer when he was rigid. We had to carry him in a chair up to the hotel. And the Boscastle doctor--it wasn't the present chap, but the G.P. before him--was at him until nearly two, with, me and the landlord holding lights and so forth." "It was a cataleptic rigour at first, wasn't it?" "Stiff!--wherever you bent him he stuck. You might have stood him on his head and he'd have stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of course this"--he indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of his head--"is quite different. And, of course, the little doctor--what was his name?" "Smithers?" "Smithers it was--was quite wrong in trying to fetch him round too soon, according to all accounts. The things he did. Even now it makes me feel all--ugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those beastly little things, not dynamos--" "Induction coils." "Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about. There was just two flaring yellow candles, and all the shadows were shivering, and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and him--stark and squirming in the most unnatural ways. Well, it made me dream." Pause. "It's a strange state," said Warming. "It's a sort of complete absence," said Isbister. "Here's the body, empty. Not dead a bit, and yet not alive. It's like a seat vacant and marked 'engaged.' No feeling, no digestion, no beating of the HEART--not a flutter. _That_ doesn't make me feel as if there was a man present. In a sense it's more dead than death, for these doctors tell me that even the hair has stopped growing. Now with the proper dead, the hair will go on growing--" "I know," said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression. They peered through the glass again. Graham was indeed in a strange state, in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented in medical history. Trances had lasted for as much as a year before--but at the end of that time it had ever been waking or a death; sometimes first one and then the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had made in injecting nourishment, for that device had been resorted to to postpone collapse; he pointed them out to Warming, who had been trying not to see them. "And while he has been lying here," said Isbister, with the zest of a life freely spent, "I have changed Hi, thanks, Salmon Trout--yes that was my plan (and I'm using r for that). I've been doing the text-selecting manually so far but it's just an impossible work-load. I have fifty texts, would like to get strings of 5000, 4000, 3000, 2000 1000 and 500 for each and run it 100 times with chaning lists of most frequent words--so that would be impossible to do this way. And I've been taking out paragraphing so far--but it looks like it doesn't make a difference for the r-plugin I'm using (same results with or without paragraphs and additional spaces). But thanks for the tip! Quote from: Stefan on May 06, 2015, 09:12:23 AM So the texts I have do not have line-breaks in them... but I'm not entirely sure how that would be different from "carriage return and linefeed characters" In a Windows text file at the end of each line are two invisible characters - the CR/LF pair. Viewing the file in a hex editer/viewer will show you the characters. Linux and Mac native text files have only one character ending each line. Linux has LF and Mac has CR if I recall correctly. Quote from: Salmon Trout on May 06, 2015, 01:19:04 PM I would be inclined to use a more capable language than batch (Visual Basic Script for example) This is a sensible option to do it in, with native VBS in Windows, and it is still scriptable in a batch file. |
|