http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=628064


in reply to Fixed Position Column Records

Thank you grep and BrowserUk.
below is a replacement for my first foreach statement which works better than my original code thanks to the suggestion by grep. 
my $f2 = $pos[1] - $pos[0];
my $f3 = $pos[2] - $pos[1];
my $f4 = $pos[3] - $pos[2];
my $f5 = $pos[4] - $pos[3];

foreach $line (@data) {
    my $pictureline = "a$pos[0] a$f2 a$f3 a$f4 a$f5";
    print unpack( $pictureline, $line ), "\n";
}

[download]
And thank you again BrowserUk for a more elegant solution altogether.

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Re^2: Fixed Position Column Records
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jul 22, 2007 at 04:49 UTC

    Posted here to ensure it comes to the OPs attention.

    Replace the regex used by the pattern building code with 

        while $mask =~ m[([^ ]+)( +|$)]g;

    [download]

    That is, replace \S and \s with literal spaces as the ORing process can generate chr(9) and other characters that would be treated as whitespace and so create false columns.

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