I use Perl often to process all kinds of text reports. By far and away, the most common tools that I use are: a)split and b)match global combined with c) regex. In my typical application, speed doesn't matter, but flexibility does. It is very seldom that I encounter a fixed column report where substr would be appropriate.

That doesn't mean that I don't use substr, just that in my personal experience, with the types of text reports that I process, it doesn't come up. Mileage Varies! Processing a binary header, say like that found in a .WAV file is a whole different critter, substr is definately the right tool for that job. I am talking about text reports.

Just yesterday, a file that I've been processing since 2011 changed its format. Oops. The same info is there, but it got moved around. The 2016 format is different and I have no control over that change. But this change was easy for me to adapt to and was something like this: (split ' ',$line)[1,7,3] to (split ' ',$line)[1,4,-2]. If I had used substr(), then this would have been a bigger deal. Changing something that has been working for 5 years comes up all the time. Such is the nature of using ad hoc methods to parse reports that you have no control over.