in reply to How to process variable length fields in delimited file.
If the fixed fields really are fixed length rather than space delimited then you can pull the lines apart using a template like this:
use strict; use warnings; my @template = ( 'ssn 9', 'employee number 5', 'employee name *', 'hire date 8', 'address *', 'state 2', 'city *', 'zip 5' ); while (my $line = <DATA>) { chomp $line; my %fields; for my $field (@template) { my ($name, $length) = $field =~ /(.*) (.+)/; $line =~ s/^\s+//; $length = substr $line, 0, index ($line, ' ') + 1, '' if $leng +th eq '*'; $fields{$name} = substr $line, 0, $length, ''; } print "$_: $fields{$_}\n" for keys %fields; } __DATA__ 123445678 45612 11 Steve Smith 11012015 16 1001 Main Street GA 7 Atlan +ta 30553
Prints:
employee number: 45612 state: GA hire date: 11012015 city: Atlanta zip: 30553 ssn: 123445678 employee name: Steve Smith address: 1001 Main Street
For output I'd strongly recommend using a module like Text::CSV to generate correctly formatted CSV files.
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