RE: Replacing characters

["jt" <jt@xxxxxx>]

| -----Original Message-----
| [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Mark Allen

| I've got a physical file (actually copy of a spool file) containing phone
| #'s in format xxx-xxx-xxxx.  I need to send this to a software vendor but
| for privacy reasons I need to change all the phone #'s to "fictitous"
| numbers i.e. change 706-678-9565 to 945-224-4848 or such.  The
| phone numbers
| start in a various # of places in the file (i.e. some might start in
| position 33 others 55, 87 etc.) I've been racking my brain for a quick and
| dirty way to this without having to manually edit the file.  Any
| ideas from
| some of you genius' out there?
|
| Mark Allen

After having just hit the combo keys for Erase Screen after a long and
involved post..  Well, I disqualified m'self from answering this question
already...;-D

However, I'm not sure of the problem, either.  How many different places can
this phone# be lodged??  Is it totally freeform, or are there a (relatively)
few number of positions the phone #'s can be found??  If the former, then a
nasty pattern matching routine, starting with search for 2 "-" 3 positions
apart would be called for.  Or, easier than modifying the spool file DB
file, would be regening the report over a copy of the original files with
phone numbers scrambled to *ALL'9', if regening the report is an option.