Fixed Width file using AWK

I am using the following command at the Unix prompt to make my 'infile' into a fixed width file of 100 characters.

awk '{printf "%-100s\n",$0}' infile > outfile

However, there are some records with a special character "�"

These records are using 3 characters in place of one and my record size is increasing to 102 because of that.

Can someone suggest me a solution so that the width of the record does not exceed 100 when I transfer this file as text to other server using ftp?

Regards,
Alok

try something like:

awk '{printf "%-100s\n", substr($0,1,100 } ' filename

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