replace 3rd field of space delimited text file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

how to replace the 3rd colum? Each line begins similarly, but they all ends variously.

XX YY 03 variable text here
XX YY 03 more variable text here
XX YY 03 even more variable text here really long setence
XX YY 03 variable numbers also appear 03 11. 123 456
XX YY 03 the occasional comma, and period. are in here also

anyway, I want the above text file to look like this:

XX YY 01 variable text here
XX YY 01 more variable text here
XX YY 01 even more variable text here really long setence
XX YY 01 variable numbers also 03 11. 123 456
XX YY 01 the occasional comma, and period. are in here also

The X's and Y's are ALWAYS random two-digit numbers, the 3rd colum is always 03, but sometimes 03 is found elsewhere in the line. So the only thing I want changed is the 3rd column from 03 to 01. (as seen above)

Any ideas? I searched and found extensive sed/awk tricks..but this (I think) is simpler.

2

Something like this?

awk '{$3="01"}1' file
3

assuming XX and YY never match 03

sed 's/03/01/' infile
4

Franklin52, your reply helped, thank you... not sure why but the commad:
awk '{$3="01"}1' file
did not work
however, it got me thinking of what would work and I came up with this:
awk '{$3="01"; print $0}' file
this seemed to work. Does this make sense?
Thank you so much!

5

All these should work.

awk '{$3="01"};1' filename

awk '$3="01"' filename

awk '{$3="01"}1' filename