Re: how to identify a fixed width file

[reasonablekeith]

Why don't you try running through the file counting up the number of times a line of a given length is seen...

my %line_count_by_length;
while (<DATA>) {
    my $line_length = length($_);
    $line_count_by_length{$line_length}++;
}

If any (or a sufficiently large portion of) those line counts represent a big percentage of the total line count, you could make a guess that the file was fixed width. Perhaps also giving a weighting on how many different line lengths are represented in the file, compared to how many you might expect given the file's length?

[ftumsh]

My initial stab was a count of record lengths which was fine until the different length files cropped up.

I think bringing that back along with some analysis of the counts, along with tachyon/mortitz' text OR should go a long way to solving this