#!/perl/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Data::Dumper; my $str = '06/19/2007 10:50 AM 1dfgfg'; my $spec = 'A12A12A15A10'; # adjust this spec to meet your columnar needs my @arr = unpack($spec, $str); print Dumper(\@arr); print "\n"; print "username is ", $arr[3], "\n"; print "\n"; __OUTPUT__ $VAR1 = [ '06/19/2007', '10:50 AM', '', '1dfgfg' ]; username is 1dfgfg