#! perl -sw
use warnings;
use strict;

open( FILE, '<', shift) or die "Couldn't open $::FILE; $!";
@ARGV = map{ [ split(/-/, $_, 2) ] } @ARGV
	or die 'usage $0: file c1-c2 [ c1-c2 [ ... ] ] >modified_file';
while (my $line = <FILE>) {
	for (  @ARGV ) {
		next if $_->[0] > length $line;
		$_->[1] = length $line if $_->[1] > length $line;
		local *_ = \substr($line, $_->[0], $_->[1]-$_->[0] + 1);
		tr[a-zA-Z0-9\n\|\-'][ ]c;
		$_ .= ' ' x tr['][]d;
	}
	print $line;
}
close FILE;