Read user given file character by character in bash

Question

I have a file which is kind of unformatted, I want to place a new-line after every 100th character and remove any other new lines in it so that file may look with consistent width and readable

This code snippet helps read all the lines

 while read LINE
        do
                len=${#LINE}
                echo "Line length is : $len"
        done < $file

but how do i do same for characters

Idea is to have something like this : (just an example, it may have syntax errors, not implemented yet)

 while read ch  #read character
  do
         chcount++ # increment character count

    if [ "$chcount" -eq "100" && "$ch"!="\n" ] #if 100th character and is not a new line
    then
        echo -e "\n" #echo new line
    elif [ "$ch"=="\n" ]  #if character is not 100th but new line
        then
        ch=" " $replace it with space
     fi
  done < $file

I am learning bash, so please go easy!!

Answer 1

I want to place a new-line after every 100th character and remove any other new lines in it so that file may look with consistent width and readable

Unless you have a good reason to write a script, go ahead but you don't need one.

Remove the newline from the input and fold it. Saying:

tr -d '\n' < inputfile | fold -w 100

should achieve the desired result.

Answer 2

bash adds a -n flag to the standard read command to specify a number of characters to read, rather than a full line:

while read -n1 c; do
    echo "$c"
done < $file