handling maximum number characters in an input file

Hi,

Can anyone help me? An input file has three lines. Each line should only be 2098 as number of characters however line 2 of the input file has more than the maximum number of characters, it exceeded up to 4098. What should I do so that could handle maximum number of characters? that it could still process even if the characters of a line exceeded?

Hope you could help me on this..

Thanks

I didn't get it, do you want to process the input file if the number is above certain value or not ? What solution you are looking for, shell script, perl, awk ? What access you have and what is the OS ?
In general, before deploying the input file, you have to scan each line, count the number of characters, and proceed based on the returned value.