The commands to take only part of the text on a line are awk and cut . With awk you can manipulate lines in several ways. Here is a short awk guide. Cut takes characters in fixed positions on the line or field with field separator characters. You see your file in character and two spaces format.
Explanation is in the od manual.
Use man od to look at it. Unix shell scripts can be used to manipulate texts. There are several programmable editors, best known is Emacs. You will need some information on Unix regular expressions when using sed or tr. There is an introduction to regular expressions at the end of Short awk guide.