neilwatson has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have some tables like this: 
blah blah ;; yada yada ;; etc etc
A much longer field ;; yada yada ;; etc etc
Each field can be any width. I want to align the columns including the delimiters. A command like column removes the delimiter. I want to keep the delimiter. I thought this would have been done already, but I can't find anything. So I'm turning to Perl. Again I thought someone would have done this before, but my search has turned up empty. Do I have to roll my own?

UPDATE: You can scrub this node. This works: 

cat file.txt |sed -e 's/;;/;;@@/g' | column -s '@@' -t
It adds a second, temporary delimiter.

Neil Watson
watson-wilson.ca

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Re: Aligning delimited columns
by hbm (Hermit) on May 31, 2013 at 14:19 UTC

    No need to pipe the file into sed (i.e., why read the file twice?) 

    sed 's/;;/;;@@/g' file.txt | column -s '@@' -t

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Re: Aligning delimited columns
by ww (Archbishop) on May 31, 2013 at 17:53 UTC

    Keep the delimiter? See perldoc -f split

    #!/usr/bin/perl
use 5.016;
use Data::Dumper;

my $text = "blah blah ;; yada yada ;; etc etc \n
A much longer field ;; yada yada ;; etc etc";

my @arr = split /(;;)/,$text;   # capture delimiter

say Dumper @arr;

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    Is this what you mean you say you want to keep the delimiter?

    C:\> 1036247.pl
$VAR1 = 'blah blah ';
$VAR2 = ';;';
$VAR3 = ' yada yada ';
$VAR4 = ';;';
$VAR5 = ' etc etc

A much longer field ';
$VAR6 = ';;';
$VAR7 = ' yada yada ';
$VAR8 = ';;';
$VAR9 = ' etc etc';

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    If you didn't program your executable by toggling in binary, it wasn't really programming!

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