Copy a block of text to a specific point in another file

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to move a block of text from one file to a specific point in another. I have a large amount of files that looks like this:

H                 -9.92247800    1.33807800   -0.69208300  
S                 -9.74392800    0.01073000   -0.55448800   
C                 -7.98603700    0.04294200   -0.19355700   
C                 -7.45325900   -1.23715800    0.02112600
...  

And I want to move the columns of numbers to files that looks like this before:

...
0 1 0 1 0 1

H                0  H
S                0  H
C                0  H
C                0  H
...

And so should like this after:

...
0 1 0 1 0 1

H                0 -9.92247800    1.33807800   -0.69208300 H
S                0 -9.74392800    0.01073000   -0.55448800 H
C                0 -7.98603700    0.04294200   -0.19355700 H
C                0 -7.45325900   -1.23715800    0.02112600 H
...

Is there anyway to automate this for a large number of files? I'm aware that I can select a block, copy it, and paste it into the other file manually, but I have too many files for this to be feasible.

The number blocks always begins and ends at the same location (line and column) and the place I want to paste to always is at the same line and column.

Answer 1

Don't know if you are up for Python, and there is likely a pithy way using a different language, but Python can do this with something like:

Code:

# describe where the text block is located
f1_start = 2, 18
f1_size = 4, 40
f2_start = 4, 19

# open all three files
with open('file1', 'rU') as f1, open('file2', 'rU') as f2, open('file3', 'w') as f3:
    
    # skip some lines in file1
    for _ in range(f1_start[0] - 1):
        f1.readline()
        
    # write first block of file2 to file3
    for _ in range(f2_start[0] - 1):
        f3.write(f2.readline())
        
    # read from and merge lines in file1 and file 2
    for _ in range(f1_size[0]):
        l1 = f1.readline()[f1_start[1]:f1_start[1] + f1_size[1]].rstrip()
        l2 = f2.readline()
        l3 = l2[:f2_start[1]] + l1 + l2[f2_start[1]:]
        f3.write(l3)
        
    # write remaining lines from file2 to file3
    while True:
        l2 = f2.read()
        if not l2:
            break
        f3.write(l2)

Result:

...
0 1 0 1 0 1

H                0 -9.92247800    1.33807800   -0.69208300 H
S                0 -9.74392800    0.01073000   -0.55448800 H
C                0 -7.98603700    0.04294200   -0.19355700 H
C                0 -7.45325900   -1.23715800    0.02112600 H
...