search for: ab34cd78

Hello, I am working with R version 2.10.1 under windows. In a text file, I need to replace all characters at certain column positions with blanks. For example, say the file contains two lines and looks like this: ab34cd78e fg3 hi78j I'd like to replace everything at positions 3-4 and 7-8 with blanks, so the output should be: ab cd e fg hi j [I'm not sure if this is really an R question(?), solutions outside of R - maybe via shell() or so - are welcome!] Thanks, Heinrich.